In Canada these are called runaway lanes and I found two cases that were tagged as highway=service, they’re now changed.

Just hire an employee/contractor who’s job is to do mapping.

It’s my personal feeling is that things that are “on a map, factual, and current” should be welcome on OpenStreetMap but not necessarily endorsed or rendered.

This is a bit of an extreme, but something like “the location of the President of the United States” is “on a map, factual, and current”. It might even be something you might make a map of, but it’s obviously not something you want in OSM.

For a less absurd example, how about “Elvis Presley” sightings, or “UFO sightings”. These are semi-geographical bits of data, but still not things that I think belong in OSM.

I think here are some better guidelines of what belongs in the main OSM db.

1. Is it likely to be used in more than one map?
2. Is it possible to keep the data up-to-date without regular imports?

If the answer to either of these is no, than there is a good chance your data is better off as a separate data source.

If you’re still not seeing the changes, this is probably related to your browser cache.

You can try pressing CTRL-SHIFT-R to clear your browser cache and reload the map. I think it’s more likely that the map server is just taking it’s time to regenerate the tiles.

If I remember correctly, It’s mostly deciduous trees in the Smoke Bluffs, so SimonPoole’s suggestion of going in the winter is probably good. December-February is probably your window for minimal foliage.

On fairly labor intensive solution would be to use a rangefinder and calculate positions based on existing known positions.

Regarding grades, I think they are pretty verifiable. Much more so than road grades, at least. Routes will get graded by consensus, usually based on typical condition. Unlike roads, waterways don’t require constant human maintenance, and so baring an significant weather event that changes the landscape, the grade is fairly consistent from year to year. Grades of often published and so they can probably be sourced from outside OSM too.

I haven’t been involved in any edits in your country, but there’s a few ways you might be able to stop the fighting:

• Message the offending user or users (it’s possible the users don’t understand what they’re doing).
• Add comments to your changes to explain them.
• Add source=local knowledge tags to your changes.

I haven’t been involved in any of the tagging, but I can tell you how these happen to be tagged (at least in some cases) in Western Canada and the US.

US

• National Park: boundary=national_park and boundary:type=protected_area
• State Park: neither, just leisure=park

Canada

• National Park: boundary=national_park (no protected tags)
• Provincial Park: boundary=national_park (no protected tags)

Note that parks in Canada are protected (at least till someone with enough money convinces the government to move the borders), it’s just the tags that are missing.