Discovering Interesting Tasks and Challenges
At the time of writing, MapRoulette has well over 4000 Challenges with hundreds of thousands of Tasks. 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.
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.
MapRoulette offers powerful filters to help you uncover Challenges you may be interested in. There are four types of filters at the moment: Topic, Difficulty, Location and Text.
You can combine these filters as you wish.
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.
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.
MapRoulette Challenges cover the entire world. But if you only want to fix the map in the Philippines for example, you can do that using filters. First, pan and zoom the map to the area you are interested in fixing. Then, select 'Within Map Bounds' or 'Intersecting Map Bounds' from the Location filter menu. The Challenge list will now be limited to Challenges that cover the map area.
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.
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 Challenge titles and descriptions.