{Insert standard apology about poor english from non-native speaker here}

So, I've found this beautiful thing, the OSM, I'm feeling so inspired and motivated - finally a platform where I can make contribution and fixes knowing that my efforts will not be in vain!

I'm currently living in Gyumri, Armenia, and maps here... have issues. On Google Maps, seems that building were autogenerated from satellite images - there are obvious errors, missing buildings, nonexistent buildings, buildings with weird geometry, buildings that are crossing roads or each other, roads that in reality are footpaths, footpaths that are ending abruptly (because they are partly hidden by trees on satellite image) - you name it. Addresses are absent on 90% of buildings. In my city, all you can do in Google Maps - 'add missing place' or 'add missing address' ('fix road' option in my area is not available), by filling some form and hope that it will be accepted by somebody someday. But where should I add address if the building itself is not present on the map!?

At least Google is accepting edits related to places (working hours, changed location etc.) pretty fast usually. In case of Yandex Maps that is not the case. Those were my favorite maps (especially UI-wise) before... before I've tried to start contributing and fix errors about ogranizations I visit. Seems that in vast majority of edits you will receive seemingly automatic "Unfortunately we were unable to confirm" letter. "We need more information to confirm the edit. Please contact support." What? Why? Oh well... After writing to support, they usually do add edits without any additional questions. - "Why did you reject same edits in the first place? That is looking almost automatical. Are you defending from bots that way? What did I do wrong and how can I do edits 'the right way' in the future to avoid bothering you and wasting time of support specialists?" - "Sorry, we do not disclose details of our verification processes. Please be understanding.". That's demotivating. If I'm adding a photo of some shop that have none of them - it can wait for a 'verification' for a month or more. I'm still waiting! Photos usually greatly help me to navigate in new places...

After that, OSM feels like a breathe of fresh air, like a knight on a white horse (haha, sorry) that should free me from that corporate bureaucracy and finally allow me to do useful stuff for free! (lol)

Though that's a pity that by making changes on OSM I cannot enhance my experience with sites and services that rely on other maps (for some food delivery services you cannot even pick your location if your house's address is not on a map - and you're lucky if it allowes to type in any address without validation). I really hope that more and more businesses will rely on OSM's data in the future.
And, though I'm annoyed by Yandex & Google - honestly, currently I do not see real alternatives when I use maps to search for some organization or just find a nice place to have a lunch - I really rely on photos, ratings, user's feedbacks and a flexible search by name and organization type... (at least, I used that on a daily basis when I was living in a big city, where most organizations are on map and data is usually relevant). In that sense, OSM is clearly deeply map-centric, businesses are not in its focus, I understand that. I can recommend it to my friends to search for an address, not for 'fish restaurant'.
Of course, there are apps like 'Maps.me', that do use OSM data and seem more average-user-friendly, but in my place they are not so popular, almost unknown, so quality and comleteness of data that should be added by users suffers, comparing to mainstream map services. I haven't tried to add data using mapbox UI yet myself, that's for the nearest future =) But looks nice already! I wonder if they do some 'validation' and how long it is...

As I opened Gyumri map after completing OSM's marvelous crash course, I've noticed bunch of inconsistencies in my district - and, while clarifying buildings geometry, naively shifted those buildings 'to match the image'. Only after some time I noticed that you can choose between different background image sources. With different shift relative to data layer. Stupid me... but what is the right way? Quite quickly I found the answer on the wiki (Error Categories). In Gyumri, GPS data is... scarce. And I have no car. I checked different parts of the city (which is more or less flat as I know) trying to find offsets what make existing paths lay on roads as nicely as possible. For Bing imagery that appeared to be ~2.8, 4.2. Buildings still seemed off, but now I was modifying them with some amount of confidence - clearly, buildings were marked without gps data before, seemingly created using Esri-Clarity images without any shift. To double-check myself, today I switched to Esri, hid data layer, shifted Esri images to GPS tracks and then enabled data layer again to see buildings that I modified earlier. Well... not bad, I think, but not great either, with at least 2 meters shift. Sigh... But what if I shift Esri layer now, to match my moved buildings? I suppose, gps tracks will be looking misplaced then? No! They are still 'somewhat on roads', and that magic gives me anxiety. After all, seems that there are just not enough gps data to be sure. And now, after clarifying buildings and roads locations for a half of district (that turned out to be almost meditative process), I'm not sure even that what I do is right. Yes, at least it is closer to gps data than it was previously, but do I need to make those changes if in the future somebody may be using more complete gps data that may give other offsets? Or somebody decides to edit map of Gyumri now and finds different offsets because of scarcity of current gps data. In both cases it will be like re-doing the same work again. I don't know now if I should revert my own changes. After all, I did not make map less precise, and in case of geometry, it is definitely an upgrade. But.... that offsets stuff... ugh. Maybe I'm just missing something in my approach. I'm a newbie, after all. At least I will record gps tracks when using taxi now =)