Welcome to the MapRoulette documentation and learning site! If you’d like to get mapping, visit our application page at MapRoulette.org Our community continues to grow quickly! If you’d like to help contribute to MapRoulette’s documentation, please visit our Repository for instructions. Thank you in advance. MapRoulette MapRoulette blog Help improve these docs Site last updated: 2025-04 ...
Searchbox Short-Commands When searching for challenges, the search box supports short-commands that can be used to execute alternative searches or alter search behavior. For example, the map can be instantly relocated to a bounding box or centerpoint (perhaps copied and pasted from another source) – or to a named geographic region – rather than having to manually pan and zoom to the target ...
Map Layer Management MapRoulette retrieves its map layer data from the OSM Editor Layer Index at build time and, by default, makes available all global layers marked as “default” layers in the index (including overlays). OpenCycleMap, which is not currently a default in the index, is also configured to be included for backwards compatibility. It’s possible, on a given server installation ...
Challenge Visibility and Discovery Challenges are publicly discoverable (e.g. through search results) only if both the challenge and its parent project are set to visible. If either is not visible, the challenge will not be discoverable and will not appear in search results. Visibility only affects discoverability: mappers can still access a challenge directly if they have the public URL to ...
Tag Fix Challenges Learn about creating tag fix challenges MapRoulette serves you quick tasks that make it easy for you anyone to find something meaningful to map. The way that worked until now required loading the data related to the Task into JOSM or iD, fixing it there, and returning to MapRoulette to say you fixed it, and then move on. Now, we’re introducing a new type of Task: the Tag ...
Setting The Basemap Layer For Your Challenge One of the customizations you can apply to your own Challenges is a custom basemap layer. This basemap layer will override whatever basemap MapRoulette users have defined as their default. This is useful in those cases where you know that a certain basemap is needed to successfully complete the tasks in your Challenge. All the default global basemap ...
MapRoulette Tags MapRoulette Tags, often called MR Tags, are primarily used for custom filtering and grouping tasks within a challenge. Currently, MR Tags are exclusive to MapRoulette and are not utilized or visible in other editors. If MR Tags are needed, the challenge manager will typically provide instructions on how to implement them within a task’s description. How the Data is Used and ...
Setting your Map Base Layer Depending on the type of Task and the geographical area you are working on, you may want to use a different base layer for the Task map. You can quickly switch between the available layers right in the Map Widget: You can set your default choice for your preferred map base layer in your User Settings: The list of layers is retrieved from the Editor Layer Index, so ...
When possible, MapRoulette will assign your tasks unique external identifiers based on the fields or properties of their GeoJSON feature. It’s common to use OSM ids for this purpose for features that have one. Among other things, using an OSM id allows MapRoulette to pass the id to editors like iD and JOSM so that they can preselect the feature during editing.
Reporting A Challenge From time to time, a Challenge is created in MapRoulette that is poorly designed. The instructions may be unclear or even tell mappers to ‘fix’ the map in a way that goes against OSM best practices and conventions. Bad Challenges have no place in MapRoulette and we want you to be confident that we will deal with them if we need to. This page describes the steps you ...
