* Nathan Edgars II <[email protected]> [2010-11-10 18:54 -0500]: > I'm proposing to delete the polygons (in Florida only for now) *if a > corresponding place node exists* or it can be shown that the name is > only used for census purposes ("West and East Lealman"?).
I've been thinking about the CDPs for some time now, and talking things over with some other mappers. Here's what I think, in rough order of decreasing certainty: * *Any* edits need to be done only by local mappers who are really familiar with the areas in question. There's about a dozen CDP-covered places in the Baltimore area that I feel I know well enough to judge the Census' boundary decisions. I don't know DC-area places as well as, say, Serge, nor do I know Florida places as well as NE2 seems to. * boundary=administrative doesn't seem to really apply to CDPs, since they (by definition) cover unincorporated areas. A CDP does not have an associated government or local administration that exercises general control over the area. * Place names are a really fuzzy concept, since they're basically defined by what the people who live there call it. If there's a legal boundary from town incorporation or whatever, that's one thing, but unincorporated settlements (or neighborhoods within anincorporated entity) are often amorphous and very fluid over time. Serge gave an example of North Bethesda, which was a place name created by real estate agents a few years ago as a marketing ploy, but now there are people who will tell you they live in North Bethesda. * Because place names are fuzzy, the CDPs aren't always going to line up with the boundaries perceived by people who actually live there, but there's often a rough correspondence. In cases where the CDP is based on an actual place and roughly corresponds to that place's extent, there's a benefit to having it in the database, because it can at least provide hints to name-based search engines like Nominatim. * In general, the database is made better by adding more data and increasing the quality of the data we have. Removing data is less often an improvement, so deletion should be done with greater care and respect for other mappers. And what I think I will do with the CDPs in my area is this: At the very least, change them from boundary=administrative, admin_level=8 to boundary=census, census_level=CDP (other suggestions for replacement tagging are welcome. I'm still pondering what would be the best approach for cases where the CDP might be misleading for searches. In particular, the CDP for Arbutus[0] encompasses two distinct other places, Halethorpe and Relay. On the one hand, I feel like things named "Arbutus" should only cover places that people actually think of as Arbutus, but on the other hand if I alter the CDP's boundaries, it's not accurate to the CDP any more, so it shouldn't be tagged as a CDP. [0]: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Arbutus,_MD I'm also considering using a couple of CDPs as bases for polygons tagged with place=. In particular, the Lutherville-Timonium CDP seems to match the generally-accepted boundaries for Lutherville and Timonium, at least on the north, west, and south sides (I'd have to see about the east side). With another line drawn across the division between Lutherville and Timonium, the CDP makes a good basis for the place polygons for those two places. -- ...computer contrarian of the first order... / http://aperiodic.net/phil/ PGP: 026A27F2 print: D200 5BDB FC4B B24A 9248 9F7A 4322 2D22 026A 27F2 --- -- Decree that all hay be shipped in tightly-packed bales. Any wagonload of loose hay attempting to pass through a checkpoint will be set on fire. -- Evil Overlord's Handbook, entry 181 ---- --- -- _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
