[Geocoding] local US nominatim reverse geocode does not return a state unless lat/lon is close to the state centroid

[Sarah Hoffmann]

On Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 09:05:03AM -0500, John Shimer wrote:
> Hi Sarah,
> 
> I tried to follow your instructions. The importing of the relation
> seemed to go fine. When I attempted to verify that I could find the
> state with the a search query, I believe the original node for PA
> came back and not the imported relation. Does this mean that my OSM
> data is broken?

I've just imported yesterdays Pennsylvania from Geofabrik and that
works flawlessly for me. I get the state as an area and all is
included, so I think that a broken boundary was the most likely
cause of your problem. Some good samaritan must have fixed it in
the meantime.

Note that Nominatim is a bit protective about it's data. Once it
has a good geometry it generally keeps old versions when somebody
breaks the data in the OSM database. That is why you still might
find good data on the osm.org instance while your own import does
not work.

Kind regards

Sarah