I think it varies by language and country too. The UK had to start from zero (and this prompted the creation of OSM) but may have left a cultural impact on the kind of person who joined the project, whereas the US had freely licensed Tiger data that was really created for an entirely different purpose and created a lot of problems and stopped a community forming (or at least that's the common storyline, I think it's more complex than that).

Whereas some other countries seem to have had better sources of data available and got on with the job of figuring out the best ways to import them without making a mess.