Not really on-topic (and pretty unconstructive, admittedly), but I wanted to complain about OSM for a long time, so I'd better do it now (largely in hope somebody explains me that I'm wrong and missed all the thing).

The OSM is really important project. Like Wikipedia or GNU in the older days, maybe even more. And like everything open-source, community-driven, it's strongly dependent on how many people use it. Because, obviously, you are more likely to be wishing to contribute if you are using it yourself and, preferably, depend on your friends using it. And OSM is the kind of project that pretty much everyone potentially could contribute to, because local knowledge is invaluable for that kind of stuff. So caring for usability for everyone should be the primary goal, I'd assume.

Yet OSM is kinda "b2b" in terms it's important for stuff like Foursquare running, but is close to unusable for the common user without stuff like MapBox, Foursquare and such. Because, really, what "common user" cares for? Where to find café nearby, how far is it from point A to point B (usually in some comparatively small area) and only very little information about the whole world (like major cities, country borders). More importantly, whatever information is there, he want's it to be usable and accessible. That is, being fast to navigate, ability to make marks on your local device, accessible in offline. Ideally, of course, you'd also want to have seamless integration between offline and online modes, ability to share your local maps, there's always something more to wish. So I feel that existence of good clients for all platforms and ability to extract information you need for them easily (without any self-education for that purpose at all, really) are absolutely must-have.

Well, alright, we cannot expect somebody else working for free to provide every single service we want after all. If you want something done, do it yourself, right? It's how the open-source works, really. And that's the real problem: documentation is horrible, both for "common users" and "power users" (potential developers). There's quite impressive in sense of size wiki, but it's totally awful in sense of usefulness. It's very hard to get going if you are completely new to project and don't know anything about cartography. There's basically only one thing I want to know when I find anything new: how to use that thing. That is "Getting started" guide, followed by links to "What's next?". OSM wiki has something called "Beginners' guide", but it must be a joke, as the only thing it does is explaining how do I actually edit that map, and that isn't really "using". (Again, if we don't think of it as b2b only, which I explained why I think it's wrong.)

The same time there're articles on very wide range of topics, like existing software clients or "Why open data is important". But you aren't guided to stuff like that. And they are even worse. For example, why'd you care for existing clients? Right, you want to find one for your device. There might be several bests, sure, but neutral-point-of-view-style listing of a hundred of them does only a little better than nothing at all. If you want to know what you have to do (or know) in order to implement your own one — it's even worse. The typical github project probably has better API overview than OSM (and usually even includes some domain-specific knowledge you probably don't have if you are new to the field, which is absolutely natural in case of cartography).

If you want to see an example of good thematic wiki, look at ArchLinux wiki.