[Talk-GB] Virtual place mapping 'party'

[David Earl]

As I was filling using the NPE maps to confirm some details recently I found
myself adding one or two places which had been missed, and then checking
others for name and is_in, and I wondered about this:

How about having a place mapping week in the near future: we each take one
or two whole-degree squares (there's about 60 covering the UK if we fold
tiny bits of land into adjacent ones) and systematically add all the places
from NPE, aiming to do them all by a deadline. (We might choose to exclude
the biggest conurbations like London, Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham as
modern suburbs won't be obvious and in any case have mostly been done), but
villages and towns almost never disappear (ok, I know about Ashopton and
Kielder, but they're rare), and we can confirm current status of most with
wikipedia. Most areas have a road or river on the map to align NPE with, and
perfect accuracy isn't needed for place names. A few postdate NPE, of
course, but most of these will have been picked up.

We could also check and complete some other physical details while being
systematic, with assistance from landsat: rivers perhaps, and mountain peaks
(people who have sparsely populated squares would have more of these, and
again I think quite a lot of these have been done).

Those with coastal areas could also check and complete any work that needs
doing to bring coastline up to spec.

A degree square is about 110 x 60 km in the UK so it is significant but
manageable. Many places will already have been done, but it would be really
nice to have a good degree of confidence that we have a systematic roster of
all the places in the UK on the map.

What do people think? Shall I set up a wiki page to allocate squares?

David