Discovering Interesting Tasks and Challenges
How do you find things that you are interested in fixing? MapRoulette offers a number of ways that we’ll talk about on this page.
Sorting
The Challenge list has a default ‘Smart’ sorting strategy that puts Featured and Popular Challenges at the top of the list. Featured Challenges are interesting Challenges that are hand-picked by the OSM community, and Popular Challenges are the ones that have seen the most activity recently. You can use the dropdown menu at the top of the Challenge list to sort the list by other criteria.
Filtering
MapRoulette offers powerful filters to help you uncover Challenges you may be interested in. There are five types of filters at the moment: Topic, Difficulty, Custom Categorization Keywords, Text, and Location.
You can combine these filters as you wish.
By Topic
The creator of a Challenge will assign a Topic to it from a pre-defined list. For example, a Challenge that looks at fixing coastlines will have the topic ‘Water’, and a Challenge that looks at fixing the tagging of Burger King restaurants will fall under ‘Points / Areas of Interest’. You can select one of these Topics to quickly narrow down the list to only show the relevant Challenges.
By Difficulty
When someone creates a Challenge, they decide if this is an Easy, Medium, or Expert level Challenge. Tasks in an Easy Challenge should be fixable by mappers with little experience. Working on Expert level Challenges requires advanced mapping skills and intimate familiarity with OSM tagging practices.
By Custom Categorization Keywords
When a challenge is created, the challenge owner has the opportunity to create categorization keywords. This filter allows users to create custom keyword filters that can be used to filter for challenges with matching categorization keywords.
The categorization keywords being sorted through are declared here in the challenge creation form.
By Text or Id
You can type any text you want into the text search box at the top to narrow down the list by any phrase you want. The filter will look at text in the titles and descriptions when searching by Challenge or Project, and will search for a task by its Id when searching for a task.
By Location
MapRoulette Challenges cover the entire world. But if you only want to filter for challenges in a particular location, you can use the location to filter for tasks based on a country, state, city, road, or various other landmarks related to the challenges you are wanting to find.
If you allow browser geolocation, you can also use ‘Near Me’ to focus on Challenges that cover your current location.
The location filters use the Challenges’ bounding boxes to match location. It is not guaranteed that all Challenges in the results list will actually have Tasks within the map extent.
See also Virtual Challenges for a different way to work on all Tasks within a small geographical area.