[Tagging] Dispute on tagging place=* in Turkmenistan

[Kevin Kenny]

On Fri, Jan 4, 2019 at 6:22 AM Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch> wrote:
> The weird thing is the mixing of place and administrative entities which
> actually leads to the inversion issues, go back read your text and you
> will find it difficult to determine when you are talking about one or
> the other.

You're right, and I should have referred to Hamlet, Village, Town, and
City - capitalized - when speaking of the political entities.  (I
missed doing that.)

We do *not* use the political organization in place=*.  There's no
inversion in the place=* hierarchy. The City (capital C, the political
entity) of Sherrill, for instance is (or ought to be, I haven't
checked lately whether it's still right) mapped place=village. The
Hamlet (capital H) of Brentwood should be place=city or place=suburb -
I don't recall how far out the locals down that way decided to extend
suburbia in their mapping, and they're more qualified than I am to
make that decision. place=* is generally tagged on a point
representing the cultural/political center of the place - often near a
town square, post office, city hall, courthouse, railroad station or
similar identifiable "middle", not a geographic center. We don't tag
the boundary with place=*.

There are some administrative entities (some suburban Towns come to
mind) that really are political divisions without identifiable
'places' - and those just get boundary=administrative without a
corresponding place=*

The only tagging that follows the legal designation of Hamlet,
Village, Town, City, and County or Borough is boundary=administrative.
The political organization is encoded in admin_level=*. There are some
corner cases in admin_level - but those mirror the messy structure of
our government. For example, the five Counties/Boroughs that make up
New York City have ceded their legislative powers (and most of their
executive powers as well) to the City, but retain an independent
judiciary. (We made up a sui generis admin_level=3 for New York City.)

We do not invert place=*. If it's inverted, it's mistagged.  We do
occasionally invert the topology of boundary=administrative, but that
reflects reality in that the way our municipal governments are
organized also inverts admin_level. Odd things happen when your form
of govenrment is ad-hoc-cracy.