I run a website that's in a similar situation, and it sounds like the author is close to the correct solution, but needs to take things one step further:

There needs to be a Single Point of Truth, and it should not be your little website.

BigCentralThing should be the official database that knows about where all the Whatevers are. Your little Whatever Locator site should only ever _pull_ from them. Need a new Whatever in the database? Get BigCentralThing to add it, then pull it in.

As an example, I run https://bettybeta.com/, a select guide to bouldering in Fontainebleau tailored for Women and short folk. We have a list of boulder problems in our database, but no way for anybody (even an admin) to add a new one. Every boulder problem record includes a link to its page at https://bleau.info/, who are dedicated to cataloging every climb in the forest.

Bleau.info is the Single Point of Truth. If one of our users does a First Ascent and wants to log it with us, we'll point them at that other site with instructions on how to get their climb in there, and tell them how to get us to import it. Any other path would lead to our database and the "official" database eventually diverging.

There are half a dozen other websites doing similar things to us. Some do what we do, but the ones that don't quickly find themselves out of sync and end up with a lot more work on their hands.

It's tough because, as the author says, writing the flow to import at our end is really easy (I've written it, before coming to this realization and hiding it again). But doing it is a trap.

This can sometimes be a challenge with OSM, if the way you want to structure data doesn’t align with the way the community has decided to structure data.

I was looking into building a canoeing map based on OSM data. An important thing to map is “is a particular stream between two lakes navigable by canoe?” OSM has a defined canoe=yes/no tag, but it’s supposed to be used for legal access, not navigability.

In the place I wanted to map, canoeing is basally legal everywhere, but there are many streams that no one ever canoes down, because it would be an enormous pain. There isn’t a way to represent this is OSM today, and community tends to be resistant to adding tags that map “subjective” data.

The solution would probably be for me to keep my own database of navigable streams with references to the OSM features, except that OSM features don’t really have stable ids. If another mapper comes along and decides to map an existing stream in more detail, they might choose to delete an existing stream feature and replace it, split it up into multiple features, or join several existing features together — all of which will result in id changes.

I agree that that's the ideal way to do this, but it's just not always an option.

I run valideparkeren.nl, a crowd sourced overview of all accessible parking spots in the Netherlands. Ideally, there should be a government-owned single source of truth, but the whole reason for starting this is because that source doesn't exist yet. I'm starting to work with the government to eventually hand this project over to them, which was the goal from the start, but the only way to make that happen is by first becoming the source of truth.

Edit: I was also planning to add my data to OSM at some point, but I'm reconsidering that after reading this. I completely understand that they only want high quality data, but in my case I'm convinced that high coverage and slightly lower quality is better than low coverage and high quality. Of course, transparency of how sure we are about the data is vital, so users can decide the risk they want to take.

Curious. You’re curating from the single point of truth (spot). You direct new additions for your site over to spot. How does a submission get into your subset?

Does the submitter add to spot and then shoot you a message to pull by some unique id (author, submitter)? If you’re curating from their database, then spot doesn’t have the schema features to resolve to your subset by filtering alone, right?

This way you get less contributions.