Chris,

My recommendation would be to find a local group to help mentor you: osm.wiki/Georgia_%28U.S._state%29

Grillo, deletion and incremental improvement are different things. The latter is very much within the wiki concept, deletion (and replacement) is usually frowned upon. There is a simple solution: make very public that you are planning and try and contact as many of the affected contributors as possible. Allow a reasonable period of time before you go ahead and try and work through any issues.

The gotchas of attribution and use seem to be ok here, although IANAL. The import list is the place to ask these sort of questions.

I should be absolutely clear: I have never edited in the region in question, so this is not crying foul over "my data". This is me expressing concern that you are riding roughshod over contributers without realizing that without contributors, OSM ceases to exist.

The issue isn't the quality of the data. It could be the world's best data. The issue is the removal of data that people spent time working on. Without contacting them, you have just told them that their time and their contributions are worthless, because the data can be deleted for no reason at any time.

In fact, I would go so far as to say you should revert your changes until such time as you have contacted all the users in the area where you deleted data.

Sorry, I am going to disagree. Users create data. Removing their content without at least informing them is a great way to chase away all our users.

Just so you are aware, be careful with copyright. I mentioned this because a lot of shape files come from official mapping agencies or the like and they likely are copyrighted. osm.wiki/Copyright

OPM is not an official part of OSM, so changes might come and go as they stuff out. As for a summary, not yet. With the new API, 0.6, changes will be bundled into changesets, which will allow rollbacks, etc., but also the ability to see changes per user.

Hey fellow Canuck. The Canadian OSM community has its own mailing list: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca

I did some mapping in Whistler a few weeks ago. Piste mapping is pretty new and hasn't really solidified yet, so don't be surprised if the tags change.

Nice to see another BCer and Canuck on the OSM. We have a mailing list to: http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-ca

The big thing that will be happening in Canada will be the Geobase import, but expect that to take awhile.

You can install Mapnik, pull down either the whole planet plus the daily diff or even just a chunk via the api, then push it into mapnik.

Don't blame the tool or the users who are using it. Remember,those are the mappers today who will become great mappers in the future. It is better to fix the issues with the tool AND help with new-user education.

GeoBase has not yet been imported. As for an effort in Toronto, I am in the wrong province!

What do you mean by roads of a different class? Do you mean joining a highway=primary road to a highway=secondary? Just make the first road end and the 2nd road begin on the same node.

What osmarender and mapnik render is due to what the renderers want to show or have gotten around to show. Likely osmarender doesn't show residential buidings because they would overwhelm the map.

I have no idea about the AND data, having never mapped in the Netherlands. I would see if another nl user can help you.

I usually count spaces between the racks, but the racks here in Victoria, Canada are mostly of a common design and can really only fit one bike per space.

If you have a garmin gps, you can download the data and then push it to your garmin. See more on the wiki at osm.wiki/index.php/OSM_Map_On_Garmin.

To be a bit more complete, the data you have uploaded needs to be rendered. OSM has two different renderers. The default view is called Mapnik and it only rerenders from a dump of all the data on Wednesday. There is as alternate view called osmarender, which is usually updated upon data upload, but make take a bit. You can see the two by clicking on the little blue + on the right side of the map. You can also manually trigger osmarender by going to informationfreeway.org, zooming in to your location and clicking on the tile at zoom 12.

The best way to get a group going is to simply announce a date and time that you think works well for everybody. Choose a location that is convenient for all types of mappers: walkers, bikers and drivers. This means there should be unmapped or undermapped stuff around for all those three types. It should be on a major transportation route. The location should also have wifi is possible. Cafes work well for this. Advertise like mad. Plan for at least one or two new people, so if they do show up, you are not surprised. Good luck!

Geomedia? Are you trying to import this data into OSM? Or are you take OSM data and combine it with geomedia? Do you have a url for geomedia?