Yesterday, aerial photos showed a road near me that had not been mapped. I entered nodes for about half of it and stopped because my device battery was about to die. I saved it with a comment of .”incomplete” and why.
When Imlaunched the app today to continue, the entire road was there. Checking on the website to find out whether someone else had finished it for me, I found that the whole thing had actually been entered by someone else almost two years ago. So I am wondering what happened (or should have) when I uploaded a way close in location to an existing, and with the same name.
If the upload was successful, there will be a duplicate. OpenStreetMap has no duplicate detection and no automatic merging 
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What were you using that didn’t have a 2 year old road showing? 
An easy way for that to happen is large way node spacing and bad luck (no nodes from the way in downloaded data). If the OP provides a link to the we’ll be able to check.
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Editor used: Go Map!! 5.0.3
Changeset: Changeset: 171808023 | OpenStreetMap
Way: Way: McKenzie View Drive (1429119520) | OpenStreetMap
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Only the old way is displaying there because the new way was only given a name, and no highway=* tags
The duplicate way with no highway tag is there, any American mappers that could clean it up?
Must have been some sort of glitch in the initial download, because after the upload, both of them showed, on the IOS app “Go Map!!”
Merging of ways top of each other is not possible AFAIK.
The OSM Inspector site has excellent diagnostics for many things. Here a cutout of central Italy. All the blue cones are points where there are duplicate ways, albeit it only works if both have a highway tag, not one with highway and the other with just the name.
Occasionally do an cleanup attack on a few. There is/was a mapper who did Italy daily, but not seen him for a while so the amount of cones has been increasing. Visit this site, select routing, duplicate edges and pan to your area of interest.