Sometimes the naming of Lao places can be a real mess. A village where I used to live is called ສວນມອນ or “Souanmon” in the common French-derived romanization (AKA PCGN—it’s not a standard but as close to one as you get for Lao). On signs around the place you can find at least the variants “Sounmone”, “Suanmon”, “Suanmone” and “Saunmon”. Which is not a big problem if the Lao spelling is on the sign as well—adding the standard spelling as an alt_name at least makes both searchable.

But sometimes even the Lao has to be dug up from other sources. These days someone added a whole bunch of hydropower stations as simple name tags. name was consistently in Japanese and name:en had some romanization that was probably done from the Japanese. So demoting name to name:ja seemed obvious; name:en to name less so, but as the “English” spelling is far more common in Laos than the Japanese (even though some of these power plants seem to be Japanese aid projects) it seems reasonable. But what if the name is given as something that doesn’t exist in the common romanization such as Nam Nyon Hydropower Plant? I wanted to make it consistent at least with the naming of the river that the power plant obviously derives its name from. So the river was called name=ນຳ້ຍອນ and name:en=Nam Cnon. So the Lao isn’t strictly conforming Unicode (which is why some renderers put the tone mark on the ຍ while it should be on the ນ) but it would fit the “Nam Nyon” romanization. “Nam Cnon” seems to be a typo. Additionally, there was a relation joining the river and its reservoir under the name “Nam Nhon”.

The free Topomap Laos doesn’t name the river but a village where it joins the Mekong is called “Ban N. Nhion”. The omnipresent katpatuka had mapped it already, with valid Lao (ນ້ຳຍອນເກົ່າ) and romanized correctly as “Namgnon-Kao”. So it appears that the correct name of the river is ນ້ຳຍອນ or Nam Gnon and I could finally fix not only the power plant but also the river and its relation. One more step towards consistency.

These weeks I've noticed Weird Things going on with my GPS:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/mbethke/traces/1029314

If you compare this with the satellite image and previous traces, you'll see the track is shifted several dozen meters northish.
Has anyone seen a GPS unit break in this way before? I don't have another GPS here to compare. This is a qstarz BTQ-1000X that has always been pretty amazing in sensitivity and exactness ...

My first mapping efforts :)

I must say the fact that some kind soul has mapped practically the entire town of Puerto Ayora already was the deciding factor that made me want to contribute. This is free-as-in-speech awesomeness---compare to Google Maps or most commercial mapping services: they don't give a damn!
There seem to be no usable printed city maps here. Fortunately, I had noticed that already while at the immigration office so I snapped a photo of one of the plans they have on the wall there (yeah, it's freely usabe, or so they told me). Only from that did I find out that the street I live in actually has a name! Our neighbor is the one every taxi driver knows but the name of the street usually earns you little but a puzzled "Mande?"
Not that I expected that to change any time soon, OSM probably isn't all that popular with Puerto Ayora's taxistas. Yet :)

Most of the street names should be there now (still getting used to Potlatch so I'm not sure whether there is no preview function or I just haven't found it yet), load of POIs (PsOI?) still to add.