GoKawiilA climbing guide can easily become a private database with a nice map in front of it.
OpenClimbing is trying the reverse.
When somebody adds or fixes a route, the project wants that information to remain useful even if OpenClimbing disappears. Climbing data lives in OpenStreetMap. Topo photos can live in Wikimedia Commons. The GPL-3.0 application becomes a specialized interface over shared resources.3 4
Version 2.0, released on August 11, pushes that idea much further.2
Edit the guide from the crag
OpenClimbing no longer just displays points on a map.
It can show areas, crags and routes, convert grades, filter sectors and draw climbing lines directly over photographs. Version 2.0 improves the route in the other direction too: users can edit information, upload a photo to Wikimedia Commons and draw the route over that image from the application.1
The launch post reports almost 40,000 routes, more than 6,000 routes drawn on photos, over 1,000 climbing areas and 31 countries. Those are the project's own August 11 numbers, not an external audit.1
The interesting part is who gets the result.
In a conventional app, adding a route primarily improves the product that stores the contribution. Here, route data is written into OpenStreetMap using community schemas, while imagery can be published on Commons.3 4
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