Frederik Ramm wrote: > But we are not fundamentalists, and we do allow exceptions. One > obvious exception is current administrative boundaries; they are > not easily verifiable on the ground but we're making an exception > because of their undoubted usefulness.
From 1974 to 1997, the county of Rutland didn't exist. It was gone. Kaputt. It was subsumed into Leicestershire, because a county with just 30,000 inhabitants is patently ridiculous etc. etc. Except for those 23 years, pretty much every one of those 30,000 inhabitants (including me, from 1984) still put their postal address as "Oakham, Rutland" or "Cottesmore, Rutland" or whatever. As far as they were concerned they lived in Rutland. If OSM had existed back then, they would have typed "Oakham, Rutland" into the search box, and expected Nominatim to give them the correct response. Not Oakham in the Black Country, or Rutland VT, or whatever. In fact, so strong was the local attachment to the idea of Rutland that in 1997 the national Government brought it back. Rutland became a county once more.[1] It still is one today.[2] It was an admission that for 23 years, the situation on the ground - i.e. what people called the place - had been the historic county boundary, not the present-day one. In terms of geocoding, if not in terms of who collected the rates, the official admin boundary was... I hesitate to say wrong, but certainly partial. I'm sure it's different in other European countries where things are more regulated and where you have fancy shit like official registers of streets and a written constitution and all that. But placenames in Britain don't always accord with present-day official documents. London suburbs are the classic example: shifting, amorphous areas, often named at the whim of estate agents. "Newham" is an artificial construct with an entire borough council behind it, whereas "West Hampstead" is a property speculator's construct (the original speculators being, of course, the Metropolitan Railway and their ever-advancing Metroland) with little legal standing.[3] But that doesn't stop us mapping West Hampstead as place=suburb, and that's good, because thousands of people think they live there, and over on the other side of town, precisely no-one thinks they live in Newham. So: Historic counties can and often do represent genuine, attested, useful geographic information. If you're proposing to delete them, you need to come up with a solution that will retain that information. Or, alternatively, you could stop faffing with Wikipedia-like deletionism and focus on making the map better. OSM would be a better, and nicer, place if people went out and did mapping, rather than staying at home and doing deleting. I might have said that before.[4] Richard [1] Though legally it's a unitary district council with the faintly hilarious title of "Rutland County Council District Council"... go figure [2] And it was one of the first places we mapped in its entirety! https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Rutland_England/2006_Rutland_Mapping_Party [3] It belatedly became an electoral ward in 2002, I think. [4] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2015-August/074009.html . Fans of Groundhog Day may wish to reread the whole railroad thread. -- Sent from: http://gis.19327.n8.nabble.com/Great-Britain-f5372682.html _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
