On 2015-01-27 22:42, Greg Morgan wrote:
OSM Inspector[1] has a nice tool to check issues with these city/town/village/hamlet POIs. I updated a bunch of the POIs in Arizona to the 2010 numbers. I see that some mappers changed the values to the estimated value. Another mapper would change it back to the 2010 actual numbers. I have don't have an issue with the mechanical edits unless the edits would remove gnis id tags or other useful data. Just as with the manual edits both the estimated value and actual 2010 values were close enough. They correctly raised the value closer to the 2010 number from the 2000 number.
The original GNIS import was also wildly incorrect in some cases. For example, Mount Pleasant, Delaware County, Indiana [1], was given a population of 12,459, but it's really an unincorporated community with a couple hundred residents at most. The Census doesn't keep any data on its population.
Should the mechanical edit remove population tags on places that don't correspond to any Census division? Or maybe just flag them for manual followup? I guess a local could unofficially guesstimate the population of a community like Mount Pleasant.
[1] https://osm.org/changeset/28225500
Deleting? I question this. I am not in favor of it. I think there is a mismatch between rural America and Metro America areas. I have a sense that Metro mappers have a lower value of some POIs that are essential to rural areas. Vicksburg Junction[2] could be a possible deletion target. I am not sure if there is an actual boundary for the area. Cleator Arizona[3] is another example. People live there with real addresses even though it looks like a ghost town. The best I could do is make a residential landuse area. There are any number of small named areas from the Census that are significant names that the locals use. How do you know that you are not deleting valuable named data? Moreover, you can query on "Moon Valley Arizona" and find a well known area in metro Phoenix. Sure someday that POI can be made into an area. I have wondered what kind of a polygon would be the correct one for this area. There's no real legal boundary for the area. I have already had to dig that POI out of the trash bin once.
It doesn't sound like Paul was proposing to systematically eliminate place=hamlet POIs. It sounds like he was evaluating each one on its merits.
I do delete GNIS POIs fairly regularly, but not just because they're tagged place=hamlet. It's usually because it's a mobile home park that I can turn into a more accurate landuse=residential. Or it's the name of a railroad junction torn out a century ago that now sits in the middle of wilderness. (There is place=isolated_dwelling in the event that a small cluster of houses is still called by that name.)
On the other hand, I have been aggressive about preventing TIGER CDP boundaries from rendering, but they're a whole different animal than GNIS POIs. They usually end up being so precise as to be inaccurate. When I delete a CDP boundary, the map usually continues to show the local name thanks to a well-placed GNIS POI.
Finally, why would you want to dash the hopes of a new mapper[1]? I shared the excite with a mapper as he talked about his recent project. He had just put in the Phoenix Urban Planning Villages or whatever they are called. Now you can look for "alhambra arizona" and find one of these areas as a POI. I am afraid that his victory would fall prey to your deletions. If you don't know the area or are not sure, then just leave it alone.
Phoenix's distinction between Urban Planning Villages and council districts reminds me of how other cities distinguish between neighborhoods and electoral wards. I favor mapping the former as boundary=administrative and admin_level=10, or as a place=suburb POI if the boundary is unknown. But I'd leave the latter out of the picture, just as I'd avoid mapping state legislative districts. Alhambra [2] looks good to me.
[2] https://osm.org/node/150948276 -- [email protected] _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
