"if something is free, you are the product" ... is a pretty good rule of thumb. It's only sensible to have a healthy level of cynicism about websites and companies operating them, especially websites which are asking to volunteer your time towards contributing to a dataset. There are countless websites operated by profit-making companies, which do this, and then don't behave well. The most basic cardinal sin here is not giving the data back under an open license. This applies to geo datasets with things like Google Map Maker and Waze. "you are the product" is very much true in this case. So yes, be cynical. Before spending time on these things, look into it carefully, and don't contribute to projects which are not treating contributors fairly.

But if you look into OpenStreetMap carefully, you'll find a similar set-up to Wikipedia. You'll find everything is released with an open license. You'll find a not-for-profit organisation with oversight over servers and funding. You'll find a large open community of volunteers who are just trying to make the world a better place by building something great.

Be cynical. Be suspicious. Contribute your time wisely. Contribute to OpenStreetMap.

Well yeah it's a wiki approach, so you can always fix problems yourself. This is always true although there's a bit of learning curve.

An easier thing is to simply report a problem with the data. There's a neat feature on OpenStreetMap.org called "notes" to let you do this. Read about it here http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/... Maybe some active OpenStreetmap community folks will spot this and resolve the problem.

An even easier thing is ...while grumbling about useless data "where I live" ...you might actually mention where you live, so that somebody here might pass on the information or tackle the problem. Where are these out-of-date bus stops?

OpenStreetMap is a not-for-profit collaborative project to create a free and open map of the world. If you're going to grumble about it, at least do so in a vaguely useful way.