Google employs _engineers_ to figure out the truth. If an import pipeline is causing problems, a higher-up can just say “stop doing that or we’ll stop your pay cheque”.

OSM doesn’t have that option. If it didn’t have these guardrails in place, a million CS students will see some open-looking data (or not even that, maybe something scraped) and throw it into OSM with a cursory Python script, resulting in an almighty mess. We need the process because we don’t have Google’s leverage of “we pay you”.

> Google employs _engineers_ to figure out the truth.

and people say hacker news has no sense of humour

Another approach is to simply accept low quality data into the database, yet have some kind of filtering during the viewing stage.

Eg. Draw me a map, but include only data points tagged with 'osm-license-verified-and-spam-filtered'.

That way users of the data get to decide their own tradeoff between legal risks, data freshness, spam, etc.