Maybe merkaartor should be pushed more? I guess that one is somewhat more "newbie"-friendly than JOSM, though I do not like the entire Look-and-Feel of it. AFAIK all the tools for OSM supports i18n, whether it is in translating menues and help information or different font types. AFAIK it also supports r2l.

If you don't know these terms, i18n is internationalization (translation) and r2l is right-to-left fonts.

The right way to tag it would be railway=construction + construction=, but anyway, yet again OSM will be the first to show a new feature :D

JOSM is a Java based editor you can run on your own computer, or via the webstart applet (dunno the link), if JavaScript might solve your problem, than Java will for sure.
And for a side note, MapZen are not even in Beta mode yet, only an early alfa version, if you find the right place to mention your problem, than the developer team will see it and put it on their TODO. I toyed with it myself for a short hour, though did not save, and it smells of alfa-release, but I guess it looks promising. One thing I did not like was its merkaartor way of handling ways and nodes, I prefare JOSM above Potlatch above merkaartor on their way of handling ways and nodes.

Tags for reality, I didn't know Toucan crossing was a term for some type of signalled bicycle crossings, can't remember seeing anything like that in Norway while I lived there, and I definitely havn't seen any here in Brazil where I live now. For me there exists only two types of crossings to tag, pedestrian crossings, and signaled pedestrian crossings. Bicycles goes more as normal traffic than as pedestrians in Brazil. Nuff said Brazil have some weird laws regarding access for bicycles, that is valuable data for a bicycle routing engine.

snowshoe=designated (when wearing snowshoes you are obligatory to use this route even if alternatives exists)
snowshoes=yes (you are allowed to use this with snowshoes)
snowshoes=no (you are not allowed to use this with snowshoes)

The only sane usage I can see with this is together with ski-tracks, where I would understand usage of snowshoes might damage the prepared tracks, and therefor prohibited or regulated in some way. If it is a regular "snowshoe walking route" or "snowshoing event" than relation=route should be used.

Yes, roads can be under construction for years and years. Where I live the upgrade of the airport (that was started when the passenger capacity of the terminal was reached) is still underway 25 years or so later (the road exit to the new terminal is ready, but not a single wall is in place yet), the bypass highway ends halfway, another bypass highway goes zigzagging because there are still work going on on various parts of the road (8 years at least), one of the trans-national highways stopped 25 years ago because of funding, and now it cannot continue construction work due to protection issue such as suggested national parks. The road up to my inlaws was supposed to be paved long ago, money have been granted at least 5 times from the federal government, but there are still no paving on that road.

Not to mention the rest of Brazil. Should've tried to get some journal coverage, don't think there have been much OSM in Brazilian media yet.

As we have serious problems internally in Brazil, adding foreign cities is diverting the attention. I guess that a future project might be routing between south american capitals, but at the moment we need to get the 26 states of Brazil to route together.

Brazil is even worse, where you can have different post code on left and right hand side of the road, where a road might change post code when passing into another suburb, some buildings have its own post code etc.

If editing with one of the offline editors, such as JOSM, you can save your data in .osm.xml format and later run some renderer on it to render your own tiles if that is what you want.

in JOSM you can make a node where you want it to be merged, select the nodes and push 'm' for merge. You can also see your mouse pointer when howering over the way you want to attach to see when you will make a new node and attach it to the way, or just create a node at the side of the road. Other tools have other opertunitites. There's always more than one solution.

I am also struggling with JOSM/WMS, having followed the webkit installation on my Mac, and tried tweeking in various ways. It is only some sources i.e. Yahoo that fails on me, while others i.e. Landsat works fine. After some back and forth I still haven't managed Yahoo in JOSM, though Yahoo coverage where I live is somewhat bad, but I can do traces other places in Potlatch.

Nice to see Kenya going forward on OSM, it is long time since I visited Kenya, and it would be nice to take an OSM Safari to the places I visited back then. Heard the unrests around last election hit hard on some of those places.

not ecactly wer-ist, it is possible to exclude the data that is not compatible (i.e. from users who doesn't accept) the new license. If all the active mappers donates its contributions to PD as I have done, than it shouldn't be any problems except for some imports that have been done from cc-by-sa, in those cases, contact with the data sources can be made and request it to be liberated for PD, either in complete, or only for OSM. I guess if such is done, we will only lose marginal data. All the major bulk imports I know of is already PD.

De nada gouki - also forgot to mention, my script backed up the GPX track and posted it to OSM, without the need for me to do it..... the more automated, the better.

If you can find it documented that the data is PD, than why not? If such documentation is difficult to obtain, or the source of it is uncertain/unfamiliar, than leave it.

It is always possible to make some sort of search/n/replace script, depending on your OS. I had a problem with the program that imported my GPX broke the code, I had to do search/n/replace to get the right time format, remove garbage tags, changing , to . in the possitions, and general cleaning of the code to make it more human readable. My script was based on sed and was running flawlessly under Mac, and most likely also would in Linux. Search the net around for scripting and command line text manipulation tools for your operating system.

This constantly happens, maybe it should be posted (on SEVERAL locations) that Yahoo imagery might not be up to date, and only used as a reference if traces and roads are in the area. I never move objects to fit with Yahoo, only add objects (and brush up objects if I know the area myself). Yahoo have allowed me to draw roads in remote locations where it is highly unlikely any mappers goes in the near future.

Interesting problem, same I did a comparison of google maps with satelite images and OSM in my area, the google maps are mainly TeleAtlas (TomTom), and that is plainly wrong. In other words, OSM give you a safer and correct route even though much data still is missing, damn I am mapping the area all alone.

IMO postal codes should be marked on the map (though not rendered in an ordinary map). They should also be marked with boundaries, not boundary=administrative, but some other form as it represent a practical division of a distribution system, and not different administrations. For example, in Norway, there are only two levels of administration in the postal system, one national and one regional, though there are several postal codes within the area of each regional postal administration.

IMO postal code relations and administrial boundary relations should not be combined, even if they follow the same line. Though they should be tagged differently, so that renderers does not confuse them.