alt Hacker NewsOSM is a community of predominantly amateurs/enthusiasts who trace uncorrected satellite photos and store the data as WGS-84 coordinates with 7-digit precision.
The point I'm trying to make is that there are more important sources of error before you get to tectonic movement and GPS drift... And OSM is plenty useful even without outstanding precision.
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OSM uses a hundred nanodegrees as the grid resolution ( https://github.com/openstreetmap/OSM-binary/blob/32c3e921665... ). It gives a bit more than 1cm precision.
> The point I'm trying to make is that there are more important sources of error before you get to tectonic movement and GPS drift...
You can absolutely measure tectonic drift on the OSM maps! They've existed long enough for it to be actually significant in a lot of places if you download the old data.
This also comes up all the time when trying to overlap data from local agencies onto the OSM maps. You end up with parcel boundaries visibly off.
Whenever I’ve done things on OSM it’s based on gps recorded tracks - no doubt not particularly accurate but there are many overlaid ones which average out to be fairly precise (1mish) for the purpose.