A gps track I uploaded now says, "description lost" This corresponded with a day when there was a massive backlog of gpx tracks waiting to be uploaded.

All my uploads from prior to that date now have mangled descriptions, as if a latin1-utf8 conversion went badly.

I feel that the "status" of OSM is not well presented to the users. The "news blog" link on the left is very rarely updated, and I feel very in the dark about what's happening sometimes :(