Adding wayside shrines to OSM with MapComplete

image description here[1]

tl;dr: I made a small contribution to _MapComplete_ that allows adding/editing wayside shrines to OpenStreetMap[1].

Argentina is full of little way-side shrines, to saints recognized by the Catholic church such as San Expedito[1] but also to folk saints that are not recognized by the church, like Difunta Correa[2] and Gauchito Gil[3].

For a while now, I've been somewhat obsessed with them, due to their interesting nature that's somewhere between the sacred and the profane.

These shrines vary in size from large assemblies like the shrine to Difunta Correa in the header image, to just a small figure under a makeshift roof.

And while some are sign-posted from far away, others are found in dirt roads in the middle of nowhere.

Similarly, the votive offerings are broad, including the water bottles seen above, but also old license plates, car keys and rosaries.

With the exception of the rosaries, maybe less-common offerings.

Beyond photographing these shrines[1], I've also been adding them to _OpenStreetMap_, mostly using the _Every Door_[2] editor, which allow adding the necessary metadata.

But, it doesn't allow adding images of them, something which would be nice.

And _MapComplete_[1], another OSM editor that I use quite frequently and which allows attaching images very easily, didn't yet have a layer or theme for adding those so far.

Luckily, _MapComplete_ offers a tool to make your own layers - called _MapComplete Studio_[1] - which provides a wizard to get started with the creation of new layers without having to fully write the underlying JSON files by hand.

Given that _MapComplete_ is quite powerful (e.g. in how one can filter and string together the questionnaire items that will be shown to the users when creating new objects), there's still a bit of a learning curve.

But within a few hours I got to a point where that new layer worked reasonably well and allowed for not only uploading the images, but specifying the religion & denomination of a wayside shrine.

And thanks to some help kindly offered by Pieter[1], it was even quite fast and easy to get my little layer merged into MapComplete[2] with a new "shrine"-theme.

Which means that anyone can now use _MapComplete_ to add wayside shrines[1].

And of course, that's not just limited to Argentina or Christian shrines, but works for all places & religions.