[Tagging] Proposed feature : World wide place=* standardisation only based on population

[Andre Engels]

On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 4:43 PM, Simone Saviolo
<simone.saviolo at gmail.com> wrote:

> It's not a matter of getting the label to look cool. If you are
> looking for objective data, then tag the population. The definition of
> "city" and its differences from "town" varies from culture to culture,
> and from country to country. In the last few days there has been quite
> some discussion in talk-it about this, and there was consensus that
> the tagging of cities should somehow convey an idea about the urban
> texture of the country.

Even within one country, the definition is rarely purely
population-based. A region center in a non-urban area may be
considered a city, and a suburb of a large city may not, even when the
latter has more population than the former. It's not just population
that counts, it's also the presence of shops, of places to go out, of
religious and administrative centers, of mixed employment, etcetera.

As another issue, what to do with spread out population - in
agricultural areas it has a considerable impact whether we count them
as belonging to a village or not.

-- 
André Engels, andreengels at gmail.com