Cartographers of North Korea
cartographers-nk.wonyoung.so126 points by edent 3 hours ago
126 points by edent 3 hours ago
Super interesting read; I especially found this letter from "P791" fascinating:
> Hi, Wonyoung, I map North Korea to help North Koreans.I select areas that look like they might be good points to escape. In particular, the detailed mapping around Phungso-ri (풍서리) is almost entirely my work.I mostly map along the Tumen River, both on the North Korean and Chinese sides. It is important to map the fences, roads, and towns on the Chinese side.
Side comment: North Korea seems to be allowing tourists to take videos fairly freely now, and some of those videos are appearing on YouTube. While the tourists' movements still seem restricted, the videos offer glimpses into life in North Korea I haven't seen before. For example:
Opened the link just because I've always been mystified by how detailed that region is, and it ended up being a fascinating read. One more reason why OSM is one of my personal 7 Wonders of the Internet.
What are the other six ones ? :)
All 7, ordered by launch date (going off the top of my head, feel free to correct):
snopes.com (1994)
gamefaqs.com (1995)
archive.org (1996)
wikipedia.org (2001)
tvtropes.org (2004)
openstreetmap.org (2004)
github.com (2008)
I really think they encapsulate the best of what I like about the internet. I've been formulating this list for quite some time. Limiting to just 7 keeps things interesting! For example, it's a pity steampowered.com had to be left out but I see it less as a "website" proper. I wonder (ha) how my list differs from everyone else's.
Interesting! I like most.
I might replace tvtropes with imdb, and while I’ve never used gamefaqs, I’m unsure what to put in its place.
Thanks for this thought exercise.
This is super interesting, but I would vastly prefer a regular article with the relevant illustrations interspersed as static images.
Lovely presentation, but I’m not sure what they meant by the last note. It sounds interesting; it’s a shame they didn’t elaborate.
I love how the data is laid out. It's easy to read and shows real care. I expected to lose my current nav when I clicked on an individual response, so I was pleasantly surprised when I didn't.
Lovely presentation of the data.
I really liked reading the responses from the contributors, it was surprisingly interesting to read their personal motivations and stories.
> we sent a letter to all of the contributors; here are the responses
love this one:
> Good afternoon. Please provide us a screenshot of these OSM map. Only know "Google Maps". Thank you.
Maybe out of scope, but I find the site design here very calming for reading.
It's a blank blue page.
Really good analysis and storytelling. I wonder what the distribution looks like for joke/troll contributions on OSM and what nations or places get vandalized the most?
Contributor of ~10 years and I have yet to be the first person to notice vandalism, as in, that it's not already been/being tackled. I've been the first to notice various mistakes (big and small), or seen the impact when large parts of the map were messed up in some big attack, and there was one case where I wasn't sure if the person had intentionally broken something or if it was some weird misunderstanding, but they never came back so... not much action to take there. Now, I'm also just a regular contributor and not someone who looks for vandalism specifically; but from my point of view, the distribution of joke/troll contributions to real ones is close to zero (c.q. infinity). Dunno why, I guess most people simply mean well?
I'm also not a big contributor, but I haven't noticed any vandalism in the places where I map (Copenhagen, Denmark and around the west midlands of UK), but I have stumbled upon the occasional edit war where someone will be removing features like their private pond and someone will be reverting their removal.
Interesting, thanks for the reply and your contributions. This makes me happy to hear!
I wonder how things have evolved in the last decade as North Korea has tried to evolve quickly at least in Pyongyang and more people inside the country have access to tech than ever before.