If you ever pull up OpenStreetMap and notice that it has stale/bad data for an area, I now have firsthand experience with the knowledge of at least two reasons why:
1. The community includes the sort of people who'd rather have an incorrect map than an organized queue of issues that need to be addressed while working through them—the type of person for whom a thousand tickets marked "resolved" without the underlying issue being actually resolved is preferable because it gives a clean dashboard.
2. No effective response system when reporting disruptive users. (See #1.)
... then there's a third, too, which I actually already knew but had forgotten, which is that the tools for reviewing/diffing monstrous changesets are still very primitive. I can't stop the world to write something to fix it, but I suppose I could take the time to fix without the "stop the world part". Should I or anyone, though, for a community that's so uninterested in it?
@colby oh man, this is really sad to hear. Sounds like OSM is getting infected by the type of power tripping users known from Wikipedia. Sigh.
@rysiek @colby I tried to edit OSM once, about a dozen years ago. I bought a second-hand GPS, specially for this purpose went to a monument I knew was not on the maps. It was ugly and pretty evil. But it was there. I picked it because I knew where it was, not because it meant something to me. I wanted to learn. My edit was promptly deleted without any reasonable explanation
The wetlands I live in right now lack much detailed data that could be useful for birders or emergency responders. I'll pass.
Wikepedia is better at this. EN.wikipedia, that is. PL.wikipedia has many powerful and clueless gatekeepers whose idea of DNA is radioactive magic.
@szescstopni @colby ooof. I remember I edited OSM a few times some years ago and it went well. But these were tiny edits.
