Those first few MapRoulette challenges did not keep you busy very long: most tasks in the Zorro / Tangled / Wrong One Ways challenges were fixed within the first few days. Dang! We were not prepared for that and had to take MapRoulette down for a little while because there was nothing to do…

But now we’re back! This time with Ways Needing Smoothing. We detect ways that have suspiciously sharp angles and ask you to smoothen them out. Here’s a great example:

Opening this task up in JOSM reveals that there’s more to fix than just the one sharp angle that was detected:

This is typical for the US TIGER data - poorly aligned ways that are either under- or overnoded. And there’s still a lot of them! We detected over 100,000 cases, not all of which are loaded for this challenge yet.

This challenge is bound to have some more tasks than usual that are not ‘real’ errors - that is the nature of challenges of this type. Just skip over them and mark them as ‘not an error’. They will not show up again.

Oh and finally - a cool new little feature is the permalink: you can now link to any task you encounter and want to discuss or share. The link for this one is http://maproulette.org/#t=ways_needing_smoothing/527470359108565095470769424325999623764196595999

Happy mapping :)