Recently I’ve noticed that most of the time I spend on OSM goes either to:

• Patrolling recent changes and fixing things which, although were already mapped correctly for years (often by myself), now have been altered (probably in good faith though!) by some newbie who „thought” that the current state is somehow wrong
• Fixing things which were already mapped incorrectly for years (often by myself) at a time when the documentation was unclear or the community consensus was different

This is no good, as repetitive adding and fixing of the same things over and over can lead to hypervigilance, burnout etc., and as a result the will for further contribution to the project could disappear. As the time progresses, some newbies become not-so-newbies, face the new generation of newcomers and the vicious cycle continues.

Burnout can also lead to a premature transformation into a nagging grump, which I would love to avoid.

Solution: People with the know-how should instead focus more on providing the best documentation and tooling there is possible to the community. Working on removing ambiguities, providing accurate descriptions and thorough examples. Therefore everyone can learn (and later teach) the right approaches. This pro-active approach is more effective than a re-active one, since less time and work goes to waste, the knowledge is propagated more quickly and in a more lasting manner, economics of scale start to kick in and stuff.

Also at the time of writing this entry it is 1 AM CEST where I live so I guess this makes this post #showerthoughts -approved. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.