I'm in favor of reverting this import and not reimporting the data. If you want to use the OSM to display this data, I would much prefer that you do so in a mashup. The OSM shouldn't be treated as a dumping ground for every geospatial database on the planet. =(

The vineyards and orchards look really good. There's a few plots that could use a human touch to fix up, but most of the data came in nicely aligned and apparently accurate. Much better than the TIGER data in the area, with is pretty poor and hasn't had any adjustments yet (save for a few just now).

Congrats? =)

In the US, long distance routing has improved a lot due to the 250 cities project:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/TIGER_fixup/250_cities

The project helped identify the problem areas (everywhere, at first!) and gave a quantitative track of the progress being made. For me, at least, it was a great motivator.

I suppose that any publicity is good publicity. Pity that the article isn't about OSM, really, just about how commercial datasets can be worth their (non-free) cost.

Pretty much all of the United States road data that came from the "TIGER" import is like this. The roads are mostly there, but the alignment and distances can be all over the place.

If you use JOSM, there's an option in the Tools menu to see the History of an element (this may require the "usertools" plugin) that can help if you get really curious about who put the streets there and when.

@cartinus Ahh, thanks! That helps explain why JOSM has so many controls for changing the ordering of the members.

It can definitely get addictive. You'll know that it's really sunk its teeth in when you start planning excursions just to get more map data. You may already be within its jaws, my friend.

Welcome to the community!

Fixed, thanks!

If you want cheap GPS units, and especially if you happen to be in the USA, then I don't think you can beat these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16858194072
http://amzn.com/B001OAT9M0
Refurbished TomTom 130 units for $70 USD, and a $20 mail in rebate (limit one on the rebate, though). They include an excellent suction mount for attaching to a windshield, a car-charger, and a USB cable for connecting to a computer. TomTom units don't have a built-in data logger, but it's simple to add an open source 3rd party program to do it (just drop a few files in a folder to add programs).

Don't worry about going too detailed. Unlike a paper map, it's easy for OSM to hide details when zoomed out, so clutter isn't nearly as great a worry.

I believe it's fine for the city to use OSM maps on their tourist pages, though the uptime and response times for the maps probably aren't as good as Google's.

It's very possible to create a custom map rendering, though I haven't tried it myself and can't speak to how hard it is.

Helping to get cyclists GPS tracks uploaded and marked can be a really useful goal. If they do the uploading and marking themselves, there's a reasonable chance that they'll get hooked and start doing other edits too. If they just upload, or hand off the tracks to someone else to convert/upload, you've still managed to greatly increase how quickly the trails can make their way onto the map.

Cheers!

I only try to map the outline of something when there's good aerial imagery of the location. It looks like Nazareth has pretty low resolution, so unless I knew an area was bounded on all sides by streets, I wouldn't really try. There may be more ambitious mappers out there =).

According to the map features wiki, highway=road is the right tag when the road conditions aren't known:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:highway%3Droad