New Scientist Tech, Dec. 8, 2009 (also featured on www.KurzWeilAI.net).

Crowdsourcing a map of the world and letting anybody edit it (via OpenStreetMap's database) is now more feasible, thanks to some new user-friendly phone apps.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18249-innovation-making-a-map-for-everyone-by-everyone.html

Crowdsourcing a map of the world, and letting anybody edit it, might sound supremely democratic, but until now it has been a largely exclusive game. Unless you're familiar with cartographic jargon, you haven't been able to play.

That's a pretty big obstacle for the OpenStreetMap project, which wants to generate a map that no government agency (such as the British Ordnance Survey) or commercial entity (Nokia, Tom-Tom, Google and the like) could claim any rights to.

The project kicked off in 2004 and can boast some 180,000 contributors, who have slowly been building the map. But that progress could be supercharged by improvements in cellphone technology and a slew of new apps that can turn anyone into a cartographer.

http://www.openstreetmap.org/

Finally, in case anybody of the Maps-Listserver. is interested in becoming a Wikipedia editor, please reply to my email privately as mentioned.