small edits by new comers are not bad by definition. In this case this was the addition of a 4-nodes way and a correct tag, and your false comment says that you don't see it in Bing when I perfectly see the swmap in Bing imagery, provided you zoom in to distinguish it clearly from the surrounding trees.
I don't see anything that NormanNorman would have done wrong here.

JOSM does not complain, you just don't have the correct sect of presets loaded; and the default presets aren't enough to conclude, JOSM just sends a warning about what it currently does not know with its default basic preset.
See also the other tags and in doubt look at history of objects

In fact I think that the addition of the swamp was accurate, even when I look at Bing: there are many missing ponds in this area, most of them surrounded by trees, but clearly visible, and connected by drains.
On Bing they appear are dark (almost black) area, and you can easily distinguish borders through branches of the trees (photo taken in winter, with minimal covereage by leaves)
Raally a lot of small ponds are missing in this area in OSM data.

It really seems that there's some water there, possibly the result of temporary flooding after some heavy rains.
Don't take imagery as a proof of non-existence: snapshots displayed on Bing are frequently old (more than 4 years ago) even if they are released very recently.
Given the size of this water pice it could also be a swimming pool, or someone creating a small water pond in his garden (decorative or for security as a water reserve or to allow irrigating the garden during dry summers when water usage is restricted, or for cleaning his car, or taking showers).
If the contributor is local, he better knows what is in his home or neighborhood than what you see in Bing.

Note: all this is discussed on the French OSM mailing list and summarized on the OSM wiki ! So how to classify these is already "decided" since long.

nyuriks says "there is no boundary tag - seems like the community is still deciding on how to clasify these objects)". This is known: these had boundary tags that were converted to "disused:" but kept in OSM due to the number of open data sets depending on them for their visualisation and because there are still lot of legal documents refering to former boundaries even if they are no longer administrated this way.
the new "cantons" created in 2015 effectively replaced all the former "cantons" but their role is completely different: new ones are electoral only, (for departmental elections) where the former ones were administrative units and are still used for territorial management and planning (not necessarily at the departmental level, it could be at lowert or upper levels) and supported by many local actors and still referenced in "Code Rural" and by insurance companies or public and private security services.
boundary ways however no longer need to be tagged for these former units, the tags are kepts in boundary relations only (with the "disused:" prefix).

no automated. All made manually with hours of editing, and multiple saves. This just cumultated over time on the same changeset as it was not closed between edits within Osmose

The database lag is still growing since 22h UTC after an extremely intensive dababase read access during all Tuesday. We all see old data from the API, not reflecting the content of the db.
My opinion is that the OSM access should be temporarily turned off to read only to help resolve his huge lag (more than 10 hours).

Note: a name=* MUST be set to an actual local name, not just the equivalent of the generic tag for classification.

And make sure you use appropriate tags (e.g. you tagged an actual "man_made=water_tower", incorrectly named "CHÂTEAU D'EAU" as a "place=state", causing havoc on maps at low level; such tags are preset in JOSM with other "buildings").

Lots of errors in names:
please don't capitalize everything, use lowercase, and appropriate accents.

Final note: the list of communes is not fully dimilted by borders.
There are no open geographic data available at this time for their limits except descriptions: it is important to geolocate all villages listed in these documents in order to estimate boundaries (the list of villages allows recognizing some natural borders for departements, but note that these borders are still not the borders of municipalities that are smaller.
These borders however should be helpful to help geolocalize many things. But will still need to be imporved over time. Their precision is not decimetric like in Europe, but within about 500 meters in rural areas. We'll see later if a cadastre is implemented and published ut it will mostly concern first the urban areas of communes and for now the best open geographic sources are aerial imageries, where we can locate roads and rivers and most tracks, but not within forests (but there's not a lot of dense forest in Burkina, except in the East, and they are almost not cut by any administrative borders, most often defined along rivers).

Note: There's been recently an update for the municipal elections in May 2016, but for now it's not integrated. I'll need to check where there are changes since 2012:

- Arrêté n°2013-0021/MATS/SG/DGAT/DOAT du 08 mai 2013 ;
- Arrêté n°2013-0022/MATS/SG/DGAT/DOAT du 08 mai 2013 ;
- Arrêté n°2013-000051/MATS/SG/DGAT/DOAT du 09octobre 2013 ;
- Arrêté n°2013-000055/MATS/SG/DGAT/DOGCA du 22 octobre 2013 ;
- Arrêté n°2013-0048/MATS/MIDT du 19 août 2013 ;
- Arrêté n°2014-0007/MATS/SG/DGAT/DOGCA du 07 février 2014 ;
-Arrêté n°2014-0009/MATS/SG/DGAT/DOGCA du 27 février 2014 ;
- Arrêté n°2014-0016/MATS/SG/DGAT/DOGCA du 25 avril 2014 ;
- Arrêté n°2014-0035/MATS/SG/DGAT/DOGCA du 01 septembre 2014 ;
- Arrêté n°2015-0028/MATDS/SG/DGAT/DOGCA du 27mars 2015 ;
- Arrêté n°2015-00130/MATDS/SG/DGAT/DOGCA du 21 juillet 2015.
- Arrêté n°2015-00139/MATDS/SG/DGAT/DOAT du 22 juillet 2015.

All populations come from the 2012 general population survey, finalized and officialized for the municipal elections that toook place after that.
There's a complete PDF listing all communes/departments and their member "villages" (official term) or "secteurs" (only in capitals of departments/communes and a few other towns which had more than 10 000 inhabitants when they were officially subdivided, a few ones are still subdivided even if their population have decreased) with their finalized population: A "secteur" may belong to only one town or city (and also in a single arrondissement, in the two special cities of Bobo Dioulasso, and Ouagadougou).

The electoral file is the most up to date source of population (as opposed to the older file published in 2012 by INSD which contained **preliminary** results, the electoral file is finalized and has been officialized).

For now there's not been any newer figures published.

capital=* indicate the minimum level at which a place is the capital of an admin boundary. This is documented.

admin_level=* is used to distinguish villages from departments/municipalities. Note that a "city" or town is not always an administrative unit and not at admin_level 8 by itself when it is subdivieded into "secteurs".

Look at osm.wiki/WikiProject_Burkina_Faso/subdivisions

and its separate subpage for municipalities (all of them are départements, they are also communes but there are 3 kinds of communes; and there's a single commune by department, with the same name, but whose territorial compentence is limited to only the urbanized areas with permanent residents, but does not cover the rural parts of the department with transitory populations, as this space is managed by the national state represented locally in the département):

osm.wiki/WikiProject_Burkina_Faso/communes

It is standard in many **oficial** names in Spain that combine two languages without defining a default one.

The default name reflects this even if there are localized names for each language prefering only one.

In summary this is not a problem of OSM data, but a problem of renderers to select which labels to display when they compete for the same display area: this is tuned in Mapnik rendering rules by hiding showing/hiding labels depending on zoom levels.

Note: every island already display their country name (before that change in the renderer, it was almost impossible to see their country name anywhere, and often not even the name of a higher level as it was visible at high zoom levels where they were hidden and replaced by city names). Once again this does not come from this changeset.

But this is not this changeset that did that. the OSM rendererer just displays now the country at level 2 (if it can be located), not a higher level.
Previously it did not display anything and displayed a label only for the largest area in a boundary, but not in any exclave (this was also true for all other levels).

Also the change in this Gyanese relation has nothing to do with the fact that the default map displays "France". The map now displays correctly everywhere the country at level 2, including in exclaves. This relation has never been at level 2 and I did not change the level in that changeset. Only the OSM Mapnik renderer was corrected to select the appropriate label to display. This is true everywhere in the world, including outside France (look at US, Japan, Russia, China, Vietnam, the Kingdom of the Nertherlands, and all archipelagos in the Pacific and Indian Oceans...)
Only British overseas territories, and British Crown dependencies display their own name on the map (because they are not formally part of UK), even if they are not fully self-governed and sovereign and this is reflected in their OSM data.

In fact there's a single exception with a different tagging only for one of the districts of the TAAF that is located in Antarctica (the inclusion is partial.

But the change on Guyane was not related to this: I only attached its land area to its territorial area, and did not change the boundary at all.

Note also that there's a distinction between France (covering every territory of the Republic) and France métropolitaine (only the territories in Europe). The official international status (admin_level 2) is for the whole country (even if there are some territories contested elsewhere but not in Guyane). Both Brasil and Suriname recognize France (with only fuzzy borders along rivers, as they are also the main communication "roads" for the region, and on a jointly managed very large natural park in far Amazonia)

So what is the problem?

This is effectively France, whose "Guyane" (official French name of the French Guiana) is a standard region and a standard department. French Guiana is not a self-governed and sovereign country. In the past it has been a territory, but it opted locally for the full integration.

The international boundary of France includes boundaries with Brasil and Suriname in Guyane (and the boundary of France with Brasil is the longest terrestrial boundary that France has). It has always been included in France in OSM data even if there were a few missing tags for some kinds of requests.

This was regularized excactly like all other French overseas.