My edits are probably not perfect, but while somebody cared about mapping the town in the first place, it was out of date enough that probably nobody would bother to approve or perfect my changes. Having them rejected would probably have caused me to stop contributing too.
What kinds of issues and vandalisms did you experience?
I think the beauty of this system is that it gives complete autonomy with no oversight to individuals dealing with obscure data that nobody else cares about, while more popular data is subjected to higher scrutiny.
So in OSM it's perfectly acceptable to delete an object and re-create it whereas in MusicBrainz deletions are very much frowned upon.
This means that you often can't really track changes to a single OSM object which would be pretty much necessary for implementing robust rollback behaviour.
Map additions are probably generally safe, although there are some spammy ones for various reasons. Map edits are basically all suspect because you never know when someone is trying to sabotage something.
I think it's good to keep in mind that OSM already has moderation, though, just not in the shape of a formalized approval process. Instead, edits go live instantly – but are inspected, discussed and possibly undone afterwards. So while vandalism does get through at first, it will hopefully be short-lived enough that it does not pay off for the vandal.
Ultimately, I believe it comes down to weighing priorities based on the project's current needs. OSM's current approach lowers the bar for contributors and rewards them with instant gratification when the change is visible on the map right away. Because of that, I believe it makes sense when your focus is on growing the community. Stricter moderation makes sense once the primary focus switches from growth to preserving the valuable database you've already built.
Looking at Wikipedia, for example, they started out with a setup resembling OSM's current model, and switched to a more strict moderation process only once they had grown large enough to become the world's default encyclopedia.
Based on my personal experiences in OSM, vandalism is not yet a big enough problem to justify stricter moderation practices. But of course that is a matter of opinion to some degree.
Those edits are usually people adding useless businesses and phone-numbers. I've seen people advertising bitcoin-related business and general spam.
Moderation isn't the worst idea, OSM in many areas basically has large scale edit wars, wasting editors time as they fight over road and building alignment with other editors that don't realize Microsoft's satellite data is 20ft off from reality.
But where OSM has failed most in my view (and maybe I need to add this to the article) is that there are now free geographic datasets from local governments and without the ability to integrate them into OSM easily, and then update them (which we basically can't do), I fear OSM is going to ultimately fail at its mission
Far from the case, I'm afraid.
There's relatively generalized tools for diffing data against OSM and outputting a change file, but lots of data is released using ambiguous or slightly incompatible licensing.
One example is http://blog.improve-osm.org/en/2018/01/new-features-and-enha...