Maperitive can do this without needing too many technical skills.

SOSM, Gerald suggests there is a particular problem in South America. Maybe that’s the case?

My experience in the UK is that we have no more of a problem today than at any time over the 8 or 9 years I’ve been involved. The only change has been that, as Gerald notes, the increasing complexity of the data makes it more likely that a new user will accidentally break something. But I haven’t found it too burdensome to contact every new user in my parts of south London, checking their first edits.

It sounds like the most simple next step, which would raise few heckles, would be to introduce a system of warnings and prompts in iD. For example: * on clicking save for the first few times, it could ask for a second confirmation noting that it is the live database, features must really exist, and can’t be from copyrighted sources * if a user deletes any features in their first ten edits, give them a warning prompt asking if they meant to do that * if a user changes tags on existing features in the first ten edits, give them a prompt asking if they are sure the change is correct, and noting that they shouldn’t change other people’s contributions if they don’t understand them

All of these could be written to be friendly and encouraging.

One of the burdens on regular contributors is also the lack of tools to track and visualise changesets, so we can see when changes are being made, and understand exactly what has happened. The main OSM web site’s changeset tool still has the bounding box problem, and is helpful when looking at features being added or deleted, but it’s really time consuming to work out where features have been slightly moved, tags have been changed, etc. and to visualise all of this. OWL was very promising, but hasn’t been working for a long time now.