@Julien,
First off I want to commend you for your good energy and intentions. I also have fallen into a sort of funk in my OSM mapping for some of the same reasons you mentioned in this post. I live in Alaska and Thailand and therefore much of my mapping effort has been in these places. Lately, however, when working on small mapping projects I was inspired to take up because I read about an interesting geographical feature or historical location, my first issue is dealing with sloppy or incorrect mapping by those that went before me. Sometimes the task at hand, to add details to a nature refuge, for example, must be preceded with a cleanup of what’s already been mapped. Sometimes too, the cleanup effort has taken more time than my original task. It gets very frustrating to say the least.
I also have a scientific and programming background and perhaps because of that my mapping personality tends toward being overly meticulous. I also worked as a librarian for a number of years where the idea of creating your own subject tags was considered blasphemous because it led to confusion and hobbled one’s ability to search for a topic. The correct subject tag for anything having to do with World War II, for example, is World War, 1939-1945, not WWII or World War 2, or World War II. These guidelines are strictly enforced system-wide which means that no matter where you are in the U.S. libraries universally use the same “tags”. Unfortunately, OSM doesn’t work that way.
In OSM there is no way to control or limit people from implementing their own tags, in fact, it’s considered by many to be part of the beauty of the system. However, it can also lead to chaos, as you’ve discovered. Short of some sort of rigorous training or sandboxing of new members, the way Wikipedia does it, there seems to be no way out of this. As for people responding to your requests for help when you were starting out, be aware that checking other people’s work can be frustrating and is very time consuming. Most OSM mappers are probably still working daily jobs and simply can’t spare the time. I did some of this myself but quickly decided that I didn’t want to continue because it required so much work that it took away from my own OSM projects.
I used to contribute to Wikipedia but when they tightened up their requirements for data entry and sources to the extent they have, it became such a daunting process that I’ve pretty much given up on it. It would be nice if there were some middle ground between what they demand and what OSM might consider but for now, OSM is what it is. Any damn fool can come in and, either out of carelessness or ignorance, alter or even destroy work that others have labored over for weeks or months.
My mapping is at a lower ebb than it used to be. I’ve picked up a new pastime, bird photography, that now occupies much of the time that OSM has for the past nine or ten years but a big part of that decline is for the reasons mentioned. Dealing with nooby errors, trying to reason with people who use OSM for their own “custom” or specialized versions (including Grab, Amazon, etc.), of the OSM data, have exhausted me. I watch the messages on this thread go by and I don’t take any action on most of them.
I’m sorry I haven’t really answered your questions but I did want to offer some encouragement. I’m grateful that you have taken such an interest in the OSM project, which is IMO a very useful and wonderful way to spend time and, while I hear your frustration, I encourage you to keep going. OSM needs more mappers like you.
Keep up the good work,
Dave
PS:
In answer to at least one of your questions, I’m not entirely happy with the current policies but I have no problem at all with your philosophy. I can only offer encouragement.