OpenStreetMap has a series of mechanisms to combat malicious editors. Mostly they get found out quickly by local mappers and problem edits are reverted. Sometimes it takes a while, but it happens. Also, with lots of editors, sometimes the problems just get fixed as data is changed.

Some power users monitor the map closely, and OSM does have a (very small) number of moderators who can block malicious users.

OSM is also working on actively improving communication about edits, so problem users can be identified more quickly and efficiently.

Source: I'm the author of that blog post, I'm also one of the aforementioned moderators, and I'm also working on the improved communication (it's OSM's GSoC project this year).

I can tell you, because I wrote a blog post about it:

http://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2...

(I'm the author of the original article- ie I'm the guy in the video)

In my case, the only things I require are that the work cite me as the original author and that they are distributed under the same terms. I don't require explicit permission, nor do I ask for any money. I do also ask that the original article is linked to, and that my twitter name is mentioned. Those aren't required, but they're pretty small accomodations to make. That's just so that I can try to build an audience.

Yes, it originally said I wrote it for the Guardian. I asked Roblimo to change it, and he did. No harm, no foul.

I just want to make clear to anyone who wants to use my post (this or others on my blog) that they're free to do so under the same terms (CC-BY-SA).

You don't need to use a phone. You could use a GPS, or use a tablet without a cell phone. Or you could put your phone in Airplane mode

I wrote the article, but I didn't write it *for* The Guardian. They picked it up and syndicated it, as did Gizmodo ( http://gizmodo.com/why-the-wor... ), but the original is still on my blog: http://blog.emacsen.net/blog/2...

The database is under a Free license, there are minutely dumps of the database, all the code is FLOSS, and there are instructions on how to set it up.

That, and there's a Foundation behind it and the project has been around nearly a decade.

What you want, then, is a Coleco ADAM.

If you booted the ADAM up without a game cartridge, it loaded up its word processor, and you could print to the attached printer.

If you had a casette tape in the machine when it booted- it would run the casette.

And if you had a game cartridge in during boot time, you could play the game.

I guess it's good they're doing charity, but it's just so creepy.

The issue isn't equipment, it's storage and bandwith.

If you collect a small city's worth of data, you'll have quite a lot of images. Maybe only a terabyte, if you're lucky, but probably several terabytes. Now extend that to an entire state/province, or a small country. You'll quickly be racking up terabytes and pedabytes of data.

"No problem, storage is cheap." you might be thinking, but storage gets expensive as you increase the demands of the storage. All of this storage needs to be available immediately, so it can't be stored on near time storage devices, which might make it less expensive. And it must be stored in such a way that makes it redundant in case of hardware failure, so either using disk, or system level data replication.

And now that you've stored the data, you need to serve it to users. Pushing out a small amount of data to a user isn't a problem. 2 cents a gigabyte seems cheap. But if you need to serve a whole country worth of data, with tens or hundreds of thousands of users, you now hit bandwidth issues- bandwith caps, and overage costs. Getting a larger pipe to the user costs more money, and deals that seemed reasonable start to become very expensive very quickly.

You'd quickly start talking about needing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars just to store the data, and then hundreds of thousands (or more) to serve it out.

Commercial organizations are not going to be inclined to put money towards something when they don't have to, and the burden on users would be incredibly high.

Is it still wrong?

It can take a while for the geocoder to pick up on issues.

Also, if you put a note on your area and link to it, I can take a look.

Addresses are particularly tricky for a variety of reasons that I won't bore you with, but could make your head spin.

You're right that there is a need to make addresses easier to work with, but in 99% of cases, you can just draw the building and tag it with the address and all should be good.

When you say "the result doesn't change"- can you elaborate exactly what you mean?

Addresses are quite difficult to get right (no one gets them right, not even the guys with billions of dollars to spend).

You can get a lot of help with these kinds of issues on the mailing lists, help.osm.org, the IRC channel, or the web forums. And depending on where you are, you may even have a local group of mappers to help you. So you have a community to help you through any editing issues you might encounter.