I think that’s a little unfair to OSM. While of course it varies in quality, in the last few years I’m finding OSM is far more trustworthy than our offices native Ordinance Survey maps in the UK. The latter feel like they were drawn up by someone who just couldn’t be arsed to do a proper job or had two dots and drew a line between them.

At one point I got stuck down a dead end in a field with one angry horned motherfucker in it where OS said I had right of way. This resulted in me having to climb over a fence rapidly and take a chunk out of my leg.

Of course OSM was accurate and it turned out OS was completely wrong by about 200m.

I am now a regular OSM contributor. I rarely find anything inaccurate or missing. I’m mostly adding detail.

It's also little unfair to Wikipedia. In practice, it's more reliable than anything except primary sources, and it provides context to the latter.

However, in a similar manner, OSM suffers from vandalism, data recency issues, and missing data around areas that don't have a lot of interest where the more official source doesn't suffer.

I've been working on a map based project and we've found issues with vandal like edits to the road network breaking sensible routing, and poorer address data in areas like Northern Ireland when compared with our more official Ordnance Survey (in contrast with the above poster)

also to parent; unfairness was intended.

thou the point was not to bring up the question of quality, but authority and highlight that users and institutions have different priorities.

whatever that means

I disagree. I love seeing OSM being used in public projects. The fact that it's crowd-sourced does not mean that the government does not contribute to the data set. For instance, Poland's Fire Service uses OSM-based solutions and I heard from people working on those solutions that they actually constantly monitor the changes in OSM to catch possible errors that could have an impact on fire fighting operations.