I wouldn't say discouraged, just they have to be registered. See the list of all the imports, planned or finished: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Catalogue. In a lot of places pretty much all of the data came from automated imports. People checking the map is good, but manual data entry is a pain and there aren't many doing that.

It looks though like Facebook beat me to the punch: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/AI-Assisted_Road_Tracing