OpenStreetMap & Wikipedia

Over the past few weeks, I have made 3 open source contributions. Two of them were for OpenStreetMap, and the third one was for Wikipedia.

My first contribution was adding missing bus stops to a bus line. I was surprised it wasn’t even noted on OpenStreetMap since many people use that bus line in that area, and all the other stops were locations on the map. I feel the most proud about this one because not only was it my first, but it is also really helpful for people who use the map to navigate and also for those who use open maps like these to gather information for their projects.

My second contribution was marking some stores as shut down and relocating the area of some. This also surprised me for the same reason as the first, that a popular area wasn’t updated for many years. This honestly made me realize how important it is to contribute to things and how impactful it can really be. If I had not updated that area, some people may have still thought that a store that had been closed for almost 10 years was still there.

My most recent contribution was adding information about Megaman Battle Network, one of my favorite video game series. It was short, but I added the fact that there is a fan translation for the previously Japanese only games of the series. I think this was really cool to contribute because for years, fans have been talking about how the games were lost to time and untranslated, but that has not been the case for almost a year now.

Challenges

My biggest challenge when it came to making these open source contributions was getting over the mental block of contributing. I was worried that I would make many mistakes and/or have my contributions removed because they were not up to standards. For big contributions like code, I think I am still getting over that mental block, but smaller things like my contributions are not as intimidating anymore.

Another challenge I had was familiarizing myself with OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia, in terms of the tools needed to contribute. With OSM, I wasn’t really sure about how to correctly do some map edits at first because of some of the tags required for nodes. However, I did eventually learn from their own wiki that had information on how and when to use certain tags.

With Wikipedia, it wasn’t as difficult to contribute to as it was for OSM. One issue I did run into was trying to properly credit the source of my contribution. The author of the source I used had a pseudonym, and most of the other references had full names and detailed information. I was under the impression that I needed to have the same amount of information(including their full name, etc.) as the other sources, but that wasn’t the case.