Thanks, Fredrik, for breaking the ice on the List of Claiming Entities and the criteria for the list, which I think is one of the key points of my proposal.
The list is logically equivalent to the stated criterion. That is, if you meet the criterion, you are on the list, and if you are on the list, you meet the criterion. We already have a de facto list. In fact, the list in my proposal exactly matches it. It's just not written down anywhere. What is written down right now is a stated criterion: a country is a political entity that has an ISO two-letter code. I think that's a little difficult to visualize. Having the written list makes it easy for taggers to say "ah, yes, that entity meets the criterion" or "no, that one doesn't make it." Right now, we have (so far as I know) two entities in OSM that do not have a two-letter ISO code but do have admin_level=2 boundaries: Kosovo and Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. Why is that? It could be because DWG has not formally adopted the ISO-code criterion. It could be because it decided that the criterion needed changing, but it never touched the wiki. In any case, it clearly felt that allowing these two entities to be considered countries was in keeping with the OSMF policy on disputed territories. And that's a problem. Because so long as there are two exceptions, the logical question for others is, well, what's the real criterion? Why not other exceptions? So my proposal changes the stated criterion. The list is merely an exemplification of the criterion. It helps greatly to have the list, I think, because if a group of taggers think Transnistria, for example, should be on the list, it clearly is not (you can look it up). Why? Because it clearly doesn't meet the criterion (again, you can look it up). So the taggers can't change the list, they have to make an argument to the community about a new criterion. And *that* changes the list. As noted on the proposal's discussion page, the proposed new criterion would be: any entity that controls territory and that is recognized by at least 10 members of the U.N. General Assembly. The existing stated criterion (not uniformly applied) is: only political entities listed on the ISO 3166 standard are to be considered countries. The proposal's criterion includes Kosovo and SADR, and assigns them four-letter codes, because they don't have two-letter ISO codes. The existing stated criterion is the same as the proposal's, without Kosovo and SADR, although those two currently (as of this morning) have admin_level=2 boundaries. I'm not sure how it's bureaucratic to say, for example, that SADR has joined the (unwritten) list and now has admin_level=2 boundaries. It's the natural result of a decision by DWG that SADR now qualifies whereas before it didn't. My proposal offers a new objective criterion that conforms to the existing OSM practice. It differs from the stated objective criterion, which does not conform to existing OSM practice. If the criterion changes in the future, the admin_level=2 boundaries will change in the future, Transnistria being one possible example. If there's a better way to phrase that, or if I should simply remove the example, that's fine. John On Sat, Dec 8, 2018 at 5:34 PM Frederik Ramm <frede...@remote.org> wrote: > > [snip] > > I am uncomfortable about your "list of claiming entities" and the > importance it has for this proposal. I think that the fact that your > proposal requires a well-maintained list of who is and isn't a valid > claiming entity is a big weakness of the proposal. I am wary of > bueraucratic statements like "if Transnistria joins the list, the > boundary between it and Moldova would become admin_level=2". It doesn't > sound right to me to have such things governed by a list. I can see how > the list might be the least worst solution but I'm not in love with it. > >
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