[OSM-newbies] Church, or not?

[Mike N.]

> So here's the question: It's easy enough to tell a golf club from an
> industrial site just by walking past it, but a "place_of_worship" is
> perhaps not so clear; could one by located in a private home, with no
> external markers? If I find nothing but a house at a location where
> OSM has a place_of_worship icon, can I just delete it?

   I would tend to delete it if there are no signs there.   In some cases 
this data came from GNIS - one mapper recently found that GNIS contained a 
bunch of mis-located data for police stations in addition to the correct 
locations when it was imported into OSM.     GNIS is one of the consumers of 
OSM data, so they will eventually correct a POI location after we update it.

    I'm trying to track down a cemetery location that is right in the middle 
of a Pizza Hut.    There's nothing like that within a 200 Meter radius.   Of 
course all Google searches point to this same phantom location.    Now, my 
best estimate is that the correct location is about 15 miles away; the 
cemetery has the same name as the town that the Pizza Hut is located in, so 
they just randomly set it there.