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

[Roy Wallace]

On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 7:35 AM, Andrew <wynndale at lavabit.com> wrote:
>>
>> I like your motivation. But maybe it's not necessary. Using
>> population=* achieves the same goal.
>
> There are two serious flaws with using  population=*. The first is that you have
> to put in populations for absolutely everywhere; the normal OSM practice of
> leaving unresearched attributes blank frustrates any application using explicit
> populations. The second is that the area to take the population of is often
> ill-defined and may vary depending on the context.

My point is not that we should necessarily even use population=*. My
point is that this proposal is redundant. There is no reason to use
place=* to indicate the population. IF you want to indicate the
population, use population=*. i.e. Tag what you mean.

It is a similar argument to saying that highway=* should not be used
to indicate the number of lanes: Use lanes=* for that, and use
highway=* for some other purpose.