> That isn't meant to be a gotcha or anything, I really hope that this sort of work "surfacing" older/outdated data will help with getting POIs updated. There's a bot on mastodon which does something similar: https://botsin.space/@restobot

This bot looks interesting, it looks like the authors also ended up with tracking "days since verified" of some sort. I personally have a few ideas, but nothing proven, so I can't say it will help:

1. Any app knows the user location, even if it doesn't have a precise location permission. People still open the map and check certain areas, maybe those aren't related to user location but we can say they are the areas of interest to that particular user.

2. We don't track users, all of the above happens strictly locally, otherwise we would be kicked out of F-Droid =) Still, it doesn't prevent us from sending local app notifications to the users, such as "there is a new place in your area", or "this place is is getting our-of-date and needs to be re-verified".

3. I'd say some of those notifications can be an opt-in, just for the power users who want to contribute. 

There are also other ideas, based on gamification and even nationalism, but it's hard to say if they'll work. We have a non-OSM entiry called area, which covers both communities and countries, so we can easily shame communities who don't maintain their data or show some "best counties" widget or something, but I'm not that involved in those discussions.