text: My principle would be that we should aim to have the map be functional after every changeset. (Allowing for actual mistakes of course.)
  
  Here's an example: with newer imagery we can see that there is a long stretch of road which has to be split into separate carriageways, but you have time to only do half of it right now. It would seem a pretty bad edit if you didn't connect the bits you split, with correct geometry, to the old way. Yes those connections don't actually exist in real life as drawn, but we should also try to have the map be useful and usable for routing at any given time. We've also been doing that when splitting streetcar tracks as another example.
  
  And about the issue here, the canonical way seems to be fixme=continue tag on the last node of incompletely-drawn way. Conversely, if the sidewalk actually ends, noexit=yes on the last node. It's this little bit of metadata to other mappers so it's easier to find out what actually happened without looking at aerial imagery or asking. There _are_ locations in Toronto where the sidewalk just randomly ends (the disconnected bits on Noble Street come to mind, or https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1280972563), so without any tagging it's ambiguous whether it's yet another bit of pedestrian-hostile infrastructure or just incomplete mapping.