On Tue, Jan 1, 2019 at 6:46 PM Allan Mustard <[email protected]> wrote: > > Looking for some guidance here from the tagging experts. Please see the > dispute section on the Turkmenistan wiki discussion page > https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Turkmenistan#Disputed:_Suggested_Place_Tags_for_Administrative_Subdivisions > > The nub is that I advocate classifying Turkmenistan's municipalities based on > their official status according to the host government (see the wiki article > Districts in Turkmenistan). Another mapper, Aka_Bob, disagrees and insists > that there are OSM guidelines based on population (I note that the OSM > place=village article says a village can have up to 10,000 population, which > in the United States is laughable--that would be a town or a city). Aka_Bob > edited that section of the wiki article unilaterally without first consulting > local mappers. I have no intention of entering into an edit war, but rather > want to take this out to the community for discussion.
I once laboured under the same misconception, and mismapped some villages in New York before more experienced mappers showed me the error of my ways. The consensus appears to be that Aka_Bob is right. With that said, there will always be some overlap among the categories, and it is possible that population may not be the only criterion in a given locality, but legal status is usually a rather poor indication. In the US, at least, we use admin_level to track the legal status of villages, towns, et cetera, and instead follow population guidelines. Anything else for New York State, for instance, would lead to absurd results. We have some legal 'hamlets' (e.g., Brentwood, Levittown) that are actually small cities with population around 60,000 - and a chartered 'city' with a population of about 3,000. Our 'towns' range in population from 38 (Red House) to about 760,000 (Hempstead), and our 'villages' from 11 (Dering Harbor) to 54,000 (Hempstead Village). (Yes, our largest 'hamlet' is larger than our largest 'village'!) Since in practice, what place=* is used for is to rate 'relative importance' (and so guide at what zoom level a name will appear, and how big a font will be used for it), the population guideline works better in practice than an attempt to follow the legal definition. There's been fairly extensive discussion, here and in talk-us, that led up to https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States_admin_level for the US admin levels. I'd suspect that a similar approach would work well for the administrative boundaries in Turkmenistan. I understand that the UK is an exception, because the status of 'town', 'village', 'city' and so on relates to whether a given settlement has a church, a market, and similar facilities, and therefore does reflect somewhat the status of the settlement relative to its hinterland. (That scheme would surely not work for the US, where for instance, we have many country churches that are not part of larger settlements; it may be that the rectory is the only house within a couple of km in any direction.) _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
