"Australia's new Open Street Map based map skin is (currently) three months out of date"

#PokemonGO: An interesting day for mapsMany travellers who follow the Silph Road would be aware that Australian Trainers woke up to an interesting surprise this morning (at around 7:30 AEDT / 20:30 UTC). Our game maps had visibly and significantly changed.It didn’t take long for keen eyed travellers to notice out that the new source of what we were seeing was Open Street Map (OSM) data.As suddenly as they appeared, the maps returned to their Google standards within less than an hour, only to appear again shortly thereafter. At the time of writing, the OSM world map remains active in Australia.Getting it out of the way: Not all nests are dark green, even with OSMParks and golf courses are rendering as a dark green, however recreation areas and pitches are not, even if they are actively nesting. It is early days yet, but it appears a good number of potential nests do not show as dark green on the game map at this stage.Dating the MapOne of the first things I noticed this morning, was that my local park was not displaying as it is currently drawn on OSM.We all make mistakes, and in the early days of my time with OSM, I set the park as a multipolygon relation which resulted in the pitches (sports fields) being relieved out from the park as opposed to a part of it. I fixed this 2 months ago.This was an important clue.Despite today being a working day, I pored over my OSM edit history as best I could. I’m a reasonably active mapper and many of my edits are in locations I know well. Every chance I got during, I jumped in my car and drove out to locations I had mapped, gradually bringing the date in closer and closer on either side - some areas appeared as they were on OSM, others seemed untouched.Eventually I landed at August. Every edit older than the 1st of August was shown on the map, no edits after the 31st appeared.I gradually worked my way in, the jaws of time clenching evermore with every park and road.Within the limits of 12 hours, I was able to come to the following conclusion:The data that Pokemon Go is currently using for the game world skin in Australia is from somewhere between 11:54 UTC, 6th of August 2017 and 11:36 UTC, 20th of August, 2017.At this time, nothing else in game appears to have changed. The park I mentioned earlier with the multipolygons - it was a Seel nest, and it’s still Seeling. Last time nests updated with the Korean Pokemon Go launch, it changed out of sync (probably because I had edited it) so I’d hazard a guess that if/when nest map data is updated, the nest would change again.Why a 3 month wait isn’t a bad thingI’ve often seen the Pokemon Go community disparaged, along the lines of “oh, look at the damage they’ve done to OSM for a game” or “they shouldn’t have portal submissions because they can’t be responsible”.In general my experience has been the opposite. On occasions I’ve been late to social events because someone has decided to turn all 50 of their best friends houses and schools into parks on OSM and I had to clean it up. But, on the other hand, I’ve encountered many, many more trainers who are keen to contribute to the map in a positive way that benefits everyone, their edits have been well considered, needed and accurate.A three month buffer lets us weed out the the bad Exeggcute and their edits, while keeping editors that make us Blissey (so long as we’re the one’s putting the Blissey in the gym that is OSM). We as a Pokemon Go community can bring numbers, local knowledge and enthusiasm to Open Street Map at a much greater level than ever anticipated, so long as we keep things accurate, relevant and listen to feedback.Obligatory link to Tips for new (Pokemon Go) mappersTLDRAustralia is now running on OSM map data as the game map we see.The OSM data isn’t current, it’s from August, just over 3 months ago.Nests have not changed at this stage.Pokemon Go can be a positive force for other map services like OSM if we as a community tackle it in the right way.Also, Niantic, if for whatever reason you grace this thread with your presence, you might want to get onto this: http://ift.tt/2AbRA2z Korea is a little far away ;) Thelatestversion0.83.3correctsthis via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2icaVde