Just to add to this. I agree that there needs to be a cut off. I would suggest that as long as the area has clearly defined boundaries (in accessible official documents) and it was defined or is actively used by country's administrative officials or agencies then that would constitute for accepting it.
Since these areas often don't fall into exact hierarchy they would not have `admin_level=*` tag, but would instead be distinguished by additional tags e.g. `boundary=administrative + administrative=police`. The advantage of this would be that all the areas used for administration would be in one place instead of arbitrary split into many individual tags. And would also preserve consistency, as some countries are already using statistical and cadastral regions under administrative tagging. "_Administrative boundaries are intended for the general public's everyday > use, not for specialists._" I don't think that OSM is only for general public and not for specialists. In fact, it is already used by specialist cartography companies and startups. And OSM could even be used by state administrations in the future as well. (Or whoever wants to work with government data visualization) On Thu, 14 May 2020 at 08:39, Colin Smale <colin.smale at xs4all.nl > <https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging>> wrote: > I would suggest a filter that the area needs to be formally defined, > possibly by some level of government. I agree that whether or not there > is any active form of local government is not a prerequisite. But we > need to draw the line somewhere.... If a group of neighbours got > together and said "our area is called Homesville" would that qualify? If > a company with a huge plant divided the campus into North, South, East > and West with Regional Managers, it is using the areas for > "administrative purposes" but I would not expect this to be reflected in > OSM as admin boundaries. As with everything in OSM it should be > "independently verifiable" which > implies there should be some publicly accessible single source of truth, > i.e. the definition of the area is written down somewhere that Joe > Bloggs or I could access freely. In the UK there are multiple hierarchies > of geographic areas, for widely > differing purposes, that frequently (but not always and not necessarily) > share borders. For example Police Regions are based on traditional > counties (which are not "administrative") with lots of anomalies. They > are subdivided into districts. Calling these areas > "boundary=administrative" instead of "boundary=police" would cause > confusion! The use of admin_level=* allows a proper hierarchy to be > defined, but is > currently only used with boundary=administrative. If this concept is > extended into (for example) boundary=police, you enable a parallel > hierarchy, which reflects real life much better and keeps things clearer > for both mapper and user.
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