There has been an exciting question on the German OSM mailing list yesterday (here). To clarify this question a little to the readers of this blog, the OSM member basically asked if anybody knows how many users ever really worked on a single note in OSM at all, and how many so called “nominal members” (members that never touched any node in OSM) can be found in OSM?

It sounded interesting to me, so I started working on a way to figure out the numbers. My results showed that the entire OSM planet file (dated 08/18/2010) has about 735 million nodes that have been provided by about 93.000 OSM members. 60 million ways were mapped by 68.000 members and about 10.000 members were involved with the creation of almost 690.000 relations. The history of the objects could not be considered during the analysis! In total there were about 98.000 members that contributed to the OSM database.