Avoid Google Maps with Gnome Maps on GNU/Linux
Perhaps someone here can tell me something. I&#x27;ve had another rant, but this is a case of plain wrong information which is different. But I don&#x27;t know how to go about fixing it.<p>In Australia, addresses are in the form [Street Number and Name], [Locality (i.e. suburb, town, rural district), Postcode State]. Localities are therefore very important. They need to be in any mapping database of Australia, because people will enter addresses in that form because it&#x27;s what the post office uses and the local councils define.<p>But it looks like someone went to the Australian Bureau of Statistics and downloaded the &quot;State Suburb&quot; boundaries and uploaded them into Open Street Map. &quot;State Suburbs&quot; are not places and not used in addresses. They&#x27;re statistical regions used for reporting statistics. &quot;State suburbs&quot; are built up of other statistical regions to approximate towns, suburbs and rural districts. They sometimes correspond well enough at a broad level to suburbs in metropolitan areas, but even in densely populated urban areas they can be wrong because what makes statistical sense isn&#x27;t always the administrative border. In country areas, they take scant regard for locality boundaries. &quot;State Suburbs&quot; should never have been uploaded to the database.<p>(There&#x27;s an analagous problem with Local Government Areas, which are statistical regions, and municipal districts, which are the territory of a local council. But here the distinction is going to be rarely significant because LGA boundaries are deliberately aligned to municipal district boundaries. Consequently it&#x27;s more a matter of the source of the authority than the content of the data.)<p>You can go to data.gov.au and download locality boundaries for each state. These are what is wanted.<p>But I have no idea how to do this. I don&#x27;t really know where to begin. I once asked someone for help about trying to find the right forum to ask for help. But it&#x27;s daunting. When these online databases contain work that is wrong, it&#x27;s so hard to fix them. People will be possessive of the work they&#x27;ve done. It&#x27;s possible some of them have been corrected. Others might have been partially corrected. I just don&#x27;t see how I can go through and fix them without upsetting anyone.<p>The alternative seems to be to just accept that there&#x27;s wrong data in there because there&#x27;s way too many to fix manually, even if I start now and keep going in all my spare time for the rest of my life.