@Omnific: O> A lot of European contributors are used to a single national GIS program that opens up all data

I don’t want to spill oil into the fire. But you are quite wrong with this statement, please do not use fake news but the truth. Looking at the situation in Germany: almost no data was donated from governments / GIS programs, almost all data has been “craft mapped” or manually traced from aerial imagery. And if you look at the quality of the map data in Germany (already a lot of years ago) and the German community you would notice that Germany has one of the best data coverages and a very good community. An example for this is Munich: we do not get house outlines from the local government, just a list to compare (but nothing to take over into the map => all buildings are hand traced by a very active community). It is even difficult to get aerial images from local sources Please investigate (e.g. in the OSM wiki) before you raise false arguments…

Just my 2 cents, Michael (more than 10 years with OSM in Germany)

PS: we have quite some examples where “rich companies” or projects just dump their data into OSM and the community has to take care about the left over or the damage that is caused (e.g. Pokemon Go) => we need to be careful..

This scares me: even as a experienced mapper it is sometimes difficult to trace aerial imagery correctly. Sorry but it is difficult to imagine that AI should be better. And looking at imports as something which could be consideres as similar approach: at a first glance it seemd to be a good idea. But it turned out to be bad for building the community (example: US). And a lot of imports had been made in a bad way which left a lot of bad data in our DB that has/had to be fixed by a lot of additional manual work (examples: US, Austria) => that’s why a import guideline (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines) was invented. Something very similar should be invented and enforced for AI generated data.

Just my 2 cents.