I started editing in Michigan and did not found the TIGER data to be that bad. I am now cleaning up highways and errors in Illinois and there TIGER data is way off alignment (hint: help needed realign all those ways). Did someone just fix TIGER in Michigan and not in Illinois or is Michigan lucky to get better data in the first place?

So the other day I found out that some mappers where blindly merging nodes that should not be merged or worse, removing some nodes effectively truncating some objects.

I contacted some of the users but did not get a reply. They did not fix their mistakes leaving the map even worse than before their edits.

Some people pointed me to the mailing lists where I asked one particularly harmful changeset to be reverted but unfortunately nobody undid that particular changeset.

One of the persons doing the merges said he would stop. At least a positive point here.

But in the end several people ruined hours of my and probably others mapping time, they won't fix it and nobody seems to really care.

Yes it is a community and error happens but couldn't just people follow a minimum of rules (as in Automated edits/Rules of conduct), cleanup after their mess and follow the basic principle that "If it's not broken don't fix it".

I ran across that page today. It looks like some people don't care. They just merge nodes everywhere in the U.S. linking all together roads, rivers, power lines and admin boundaries.

In doing so they do not "Respect the work of others" who take time to properly fix the duplicates. They even make their work worse: those nodes that were duplicates on a road and a river could have been easily spotted using the duplicates map and converted to a bridge or a ford. Now it is wrong and hard to detect.

They did not "Discuss their plans" or if they did they did not follow advice as I have read warnings about the fact that there are a lot of errors resulting in mass-merging duplicate nodes (at http://matt.dev.openstreetmap.org/dupe_nodes/about.html to begin with).

They do not "Execute their plans with caution". I come across wrongly linked ways pretty much daily now.