osm.org is one live database. There is no staging server - I'm not sure how there could be given the massive amount of free geodata in the world. So yes, stuff

osm.org is one live database. There is no staging server - I'm not sure how there could be given the massive amount of free geodata in the world. So yes, stuff you should put in there should be correct. That absolutely isn't to say that the OSM community isn't interested in your data. Plenty of companies have offered their data to OSM, and OSM volunteers have done the hard work of finding the correct location for each store (or whatever) and adding it in. As I write, the UK community is integrating data on every Shell petrol station in the country; the result is much better than if we'd simply dumped the raw Shell data into OSM.