[Tagging] Dispute on tagging place=* in Turkmenistan

[Paul Allen]

On Wed, 2 Jan 2019 at 02:19, Allan Mustard <allan at mustard.net> wrote:

> Very interesting.  In the Turkmen case, the classifications are defined in
> law and involve both size (though population data are secret) and type of
> governance structure (for full details please see
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Turkmenistan#Administrative_Structure).
>
>
> Is it fair to call a settlement a "neighbourhood" when it has a governance
> structure (a village council with a chair who serves effectively as the
> municipal manager/mayor)?  In my experience a "neighbourhood" lacks any
> sort of governance structure aside from (sometimes) Neighborhood Watch.
>

I have the feeling that hamlet/village/town/city in OSM are (now) rather
arbitrary labels which don't
necessarily indicate size or governmental structure or available facilities
but "importance" for some
vague, country-specific value of "importance."  The values are essentially
a way of specifying which
population centres appear at which zoom levels.

As with many tags in OSM, with hindsight we'd have done it differently, but
it's almost impossible
to change things now.  Which is a shame, because with vector tiling we
might have the possibility
for users to select which characteristic they wish to determine what is
displayed at a particular
zoom level: population size, admin level or available facilities as denoted
by hamlet/village/etc.
Because hamlet/village are not always used as described in the wiki, and
when they are used
in such a way they essentially echo population size, we'd need yet another
tag for that to happen,
with hamlet/village eventually becoming ignored.  Good luck with that.

I have no idea how to resolve your problem.  I suspect it would require a
diplomat to get all
sides to agree, and where are we going to find one of those? :)

-- 
Paul
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