[Tagging] Feature Proposal - Voting - Government offices

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

2016-02-15 9:46 GMT+01:00 Matthijs Melissen <info at matthijsmelissen.nl>:

> From the proposal:
>
> | The tag office=administrative is used in some countries for local
> government offices.
> | However, the tag is poorly chosen as the term 'administrative' does
> not automatically
> | excludes national government, nor does the tag 'government' exclude local
> | government. It is also not clear how intermediate levels, like
> German Kreisen or
> | Dutch provinces, should be tagged.
>
> The proposal suggests using office=government for all levels of
> government, leaving no function for the tag office=administrative.
>


actually the tag "office=administrative" is defined also for "supervising
institutions", and this term can refer to public as well as to private
institutions, so not all of the former usages will also be covered by the
new tag, but I agree that this old definition seems completely flawed
because of not being properly defined and not introducing unambiguous
"logical rules". Generally, the term "to administrate" can refer to both,
private and public entities.

What I don't like in the new tag, and what was already mentioned several
times in previous discussions, is that you still insist on using the term
"government" for apparently all kind of public entities, be it executive,
legislative or judiciary. According to wikipedia, this double usage is
common for English speaking countries (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government first paragraph: "the word
*government* is also used more narrowly to refer to the collective group of
people that exercises executive authority in a state." second paragraph:
"In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally
consists of legislators, administrators, and arbitrators."), but it isn't
in other countries like Germany for instance. I would appreciate finding
either a wording that is less ambiguous and will not lead to problems that
are already foreseeable now, e.g. "public entity" for an integrative
approach, or splitting the different kind of powers already in the main tag.

Cheers,
Martin
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