Verifying changed information

I’ve just started using OSM as a navigation aid and have also recently made a change to incorrect information on the UK map.

As in all online forums, you will always get the odd person who is there to sabotage the good work of any company or organisation.
In the case of OSM, if incorrect information was updated, it could make or break a company as their icon/details would not longer show.

Wishing to be honest with the information that I change,how does OSM verify that the changes made are in fact true?.

OSM, as an organization, does not check your changes nor changes made by other contributors. However there are tools for monitoring the changes made in an area and often there will be a local mapper using those tools keeping track of updates in their area.

For example, I’ve set up a RSS feed at http://simon04.dev.openstreetmap.org/whodidit/ and check daily for changes within my geographical area of interest. I look at the change sets (typically between one and ten per day) especially of those made by mappers I don’t recognize or those with no change set comment to see if the changes look reasonable. So far I haven’t seen anything that needed correcting though in one case in the last year I did go out and do a field check.

If malicious changes are found, there is a “data working group” that you can report problems to and they can revert the changes and/or block the “contributor”. But. to the best of my knowledge, the DWG does not actually monitor all the change sets for issues they only act if issues are reported.

We have many tools dealing with http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Quality_assurance … especially about “Monitoring changesets”