Butting in for my *long* two cents: I've lived in Rhode Island all of my life, until I moved to Boston for college. When I was younger and dumber (read: fifteen), I discovered the admin_level tag and thought, "Hey, why isn't my county admin_level=6? It says on this list that US counties are admin_level=6." And so I put admin_level=6 on my county. Which got reverted soon after by SteveA. I was really confused by the "Do not tag with ... admin_level=6" note added to it, and was really tempted to provoke an edit war and revert it back, but then I realized that I was fifteen and I had better things to do with my life.
When I was fifteen, all I wanted to do was make cool maps. Every single map I had of Rhode Island (that wasn't some sort of special map) had counties on it, so I needed counties on my map. Trudging through the wiki (which is definitely not at a teenage reading level) left me feeling dejected and defeated by some sort of quirk of the system that I couldn't understand. It's taken me a good part of my life to figure out why admin_level=6 is such a weird thing in southern New England. (Alright, that might be exaggerating a bit; it's only been about 20%.) In that time, I think I've come to a vague understanding as to what "admin_level" boundaries mean in OSM speak: Crossing this dashed purple line means that the laws change in a significant way that affects multiple fields of life. Please correct me if I'm wrong in characterizing boundary=administrative like this; I'm still not sure that I've nailed it down. The question is, then, is this a useful delineation for most use cases of OSM? That's a question that only the end users of OSM can really answer. I don't consider myself one, but, like Martin, I would say that if I were to use counties in OSM, I would want to use it to visualize more granular data across the US. Counties and county-equivalents are the only sub-state division that cover the whole of the country and provide much more reasonable localization than states do. If I were to do something GIS-like with counties, I would see "admin_level=6 is counties. Let me extract all of those". This causes a problem, which I could see going down in one of three ways: 1. In a good case, would notice that certain parts of CT, RI, and MA are missing completely, realize after going through the arcana table that those are tagged "boundary=region", and download those counties. Now I'm mildly annoyed that I lost my flow to consult the documentation and my code will be harder to maintain because I did essentially the same thing twice. 2. In a worse case, I might say "whelp, time to hard-code those counties in" -- which is an indication that the database has failed. 3. In the worst case, I might not notice that CT and RI have failed to appear at all, leaving me with a broken application. Or, more likely, some other fifteen-year-old might come along, tag it as admin_level=6, I blindly use admin_level=6, not realizing this is the wrong tagging for Southern New England, someone reverts it back, and now my application is broken. Then the opposite question. What is so bad about tagging counties in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and all of Massachusetts as admin_level=6? 1. OpenStreetMap deviates from reality more than it could. Point taken. 2. Someone who reads the wiki page and understands boundary=administrative to mean "crossing this line means this part has a different set of laws and a different bureaucracy than that part" (as I currently do) will be shocked to realize that there is no extra layer of laws or bureaucracy. How often does that happen? 3. ...? I understand why this conclusion has been reached, and I accept it. I don't agree that this is how boundary=administrative should be defined (unless I'm interpreting it wrong), but for the most accurate map (TM), I suppose one consistency trumps the other. But there also seems to be an understanding among most people from the area who have cared to comment on either this mailing list or on the wiki discussion that counties in southern New England should be admin_level=6. This is probably a situation similar to what Steve mentioned at the start of this thread (COGs in Oregon, didn't go over well with locals, &c), and I'm sorry to have extended this Michael-Bay-explosion-of-a-discussion further. Overall, I think the main issue with this is what Steve mentioned very early on: >If you fancy yourself (or know one!) a political scientist steeped enough in >US law, history and politics sufficient to discuss subtle, nuanced topics like >Home Rule and Dillon's law, a Discussion in our wiki could use your wisdom and >guidance. None of us are political scientists, and, despite all of our energetic keyboard mashing, we have yet to consult a political scientist to resolve the core issue. In my mind, the fact that we would even need to get a political scientist to suss this out is a problem. When an end user is using the data, are they going to have a political scientist on speed dial to explain why Connecticut and Rhode Island don't have counties? If we can't (and we're supposed to collectively understand what the heck we're doing with the database), how can we reasonably expect a user to know? And how would you explain to fifteen-year-old me the deep political history entwining US government and how that leads to me not being able to put a line over the Hunt River saying that "Kent County ends here! Do not go past this line unless you want to enter the haunted South County!" on my cool map? Best, David (azsr) p.s. I noticed the wiki page for United States admin level was recently changed to say that Rhode Island has three counties, which is not true. RI has five counties. _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
