Earlier quoted context omitted.
>A project like OSM would be bombarded with spam and junk submissions if it didn’t have these barriers to submission. I'm not sure about this. The barriers to submissions are honestly more likely to cause object and amenity level data to become out of date. Google is able to have such an up to date place database because it relies on a large quantity of crowdsourced submissions, and employs consensus to figure out th…
Google employs _engineers_ to figure out the truth. If an import pipeline is causing problems, a higher-up can just say “stop doing that or we’ll stop your pay cheque”. OSM doesn’t have that option. If it didn’t have these guardrails in place, a million CS students will see some open-looking data (or not even that, maybe something scraped) and throw it into OSM with a cursory Python script, resulting in an almighty m…
Eg. Draw me a map, but include only data points tagged with 'osm-license-verified-and-spam-filtered'.
That way users of the data get to decide their own tradeoff between legal risks, data freshness, spam, etc.