An aerial view of the Olympics village in Sochi

How do you find reliable information?

Back in 2005, a study in Nature concluded that Wikipedia—at the time, a free upstart just eking its way into the Google results—was about as good a source as the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica. Though it found Wikipedia had slightly more factual errors than the older reference, the study gave the website a major commendation when it needed one.

OpenStreetMap, a free-to-edit and free-to-use world map often compared with Wikipedia, received a similar—though less validated—commendation last week, when the reporter Greg Miller at Wired found that its maps exceeded Google’s at describing Sochi, the home of the 2014 winter Olympics.

Miller compared not only the city but also its Olympic surroundings in the two maps. OSM, he found, often contained far more information than Google Maps, especially on features like ski slopes.

courtesy OSM, Google, Wired

In Google Maps, the skiing pavilion isn’t there at all.

courtesy OSM, Google, Wired

“It doesn’t surprise me—this kind of thing happens all the time now,” Steve Coast told me of OSM’s superiority.

Coast founded OSM in 2004. He now works at the California-based company Telenav, where he helps to make OSM better for navigation software.