I would point the Honourable Gentleman towards this article, recently featured on Slashdot of all places, which shows that - in a world dominated by industrial manufacturers - top quality, hand-made products are still prized.

We already have free data in very large parts of the world (TIGER, OS OpenData, the Canadian, Australian and NZ stuff... and seemingly more every year). Countless websites offer "good enough" machine-made maps - Google Maps, for one. If OSM isn't top quality, OSM is nothing.

On Linux, such problems are usually a result of a dumb window manager not passing clicks/keypresses through to Flash Player. But, yes, if you're the sort of person who likes Debian then you'll probably also be the sort of person who likes JOSM. :)

If you want to join two nodes at the same place, select one and press J for join.

It's probably just an early bit of data. People used to do this in the very early days of OSM. It's really not worth getting so exercised about.

Ugh, and the fricking caching meant that my reply echoed what several people had said earlier. :| Ah well.

When someone splits a way (let's say, they split ABCDE into ABC and CDE) for whatever reason, the original way is truncated to ABC, and a new way formed comprising CDE. The new way is just that - new - so doesn't have any history. Therefore the attribution is lost.

It looks like this is what's happened in case 1. OSM is not really a project for putting your own name in lights, it's a communal project.

For case 2, I'd suggest you drop the mapper who deleted the bridge a friendly note saying "hey, could I ask what you were doing?". It might have been an accident or there might be a good reason. You can contact him/her by clicking on their name then on "send message".

In Potlatch (the online editor) you can press 'L' to see the co-ordinates at the mouse pointer. There is no way to directly enter a co-ordinate.

If you have a GPX file with your waypoints _and_ at least one trackpoint, you can upload this to OSM. Then find it in the 'GPS Traces' listing and click 'edit' next to it (not the Edit tab at the top). Your waypoints will be imported as 'locked' points which you can edit, unlock and upload.

I think you mean social-network-spammingg

http://help.openstreetmap.org/

You can't.

Something has gone wrong either with your editing or (less likely) with JOSM. osm.org/api/0.6/node/38/history , for example, shows that node 38 was deleted - and had been since 2005 - until you uploaded a new node with that id.

"How difficult can it be to draw 100 line segments?"

Suggest you look at the source code for client-side renderers like Cartagen (http://code.google.com/p/cartagen/) or Halcyon (http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/editors/potlatch2/net/systemeD/halcyon/) to find out. Then compare against the bitmap images rendered (server-side) by Mapnik, which arguably produces much nicer results (and I say that as a developer of Halcyon!).

Incidentally, don't base corrections on Google Maps - OSM takes a clean-room approach.

osm.wiki/FAQ#I_have_just_made_some_changes_to_the_map._How_do_I_get_to_see_my_changes.3F

"Has someone just walked on _on_side_ of the road, and called that the center line?"

Not sure why you're remotely surprised by this!

OSM is iterative. If there's nothing there, you put down the best information that you have to hand. That might be a walk you took along one side of the road. It might be a tracing from an out-of-copyright map that, thanks to warp and weft, is 100m out. Or whatever.

Over time, OSM will tend to complete accuracy, simply because the more information you have, the better average you can take.

Wikipedia is like OpenStreetMap but without the wikifiddlers.

Oh, wait.

I'M IN UR VILLAGE EDITIN UR PUB

This is OSM. You're meant to fix the missing areas. We look forward to your edits. :)

It was spam last time and it's still spam.

I think we only ever applied "be bold" to the wiki, not to the map itself. :)

In OSM, "be bold" should always be tempered by "respect others' work". OSM's greatest success is that we have a community who produce wonderful things. Stomping over their work, especially by automated edits, will generally annoy them, with the result that they leave and we consequently get a worse map into the future.

For 90% of the world, 95% of the time, bots are unjustified. In the States, there is an argument to say that bots can be run to correct the mistakes of the original TIGER import. Frederik Ramm, for example, ran a bot to remove node tags from TIGER data, which vastly reduced the size of the data with no ill effects whatsoever.

In other words, if (in retrospect) we think the original TIGER import script did something wrong, there's no harm in fixing that by a bot. But this is a very rare exception.

Someone beat you to it by five years. :)