This is great! I just want to throw out something else I found: “JOSM: Bing StreetSide with Utilsplugin2 => Open custom URL”.

I just wanted to say I enjoyed this post. I was going to suggest adding wiki documentation for this but it looks like you went and did that. Well done!

Thank you all, I’m learning a lot!

Thank you!

Thank you both! And thank you for your question. I didn’t use the NID at first because I didn’t know it existed yet. I am a total novice when it comes to any of this

But once I found out about the NID, I went looking for more dams like this one. As for how many of these errors exist, yeah I guess that depends on how GNIS entered and maintained this information over the decades. A lot of what I found seemed like they just mistyped a digit or two when entering the coordinates.

I went looking through my changesets, this example is the farthest edit I made at 542km from where the nodes were to where I used them to draw the lake. Then for other reservoirs and dams that I found the correct positions for, there were a total of 4 in the 300-400km range, 17 between 200 and 300km, 118 between 100 and 200km, 175 between 10 and 100km, and finally 56 between 1 and 10km.

Looking at the longest distance ones, they all seem to be in large or wide states like Texas, Tennessee, and Oklahoma. Maybe if a coordinate error was enough to push something into another state GNIS actually noticed and fixed it themselves? At least before this data was imported into OSM.