[Tagging] Fuzzy areas again: should we have them or not?

stevea steveaOSM at softworkers.com
Thu Dec 24 02:48:47 UTC 2020


On Dec 23, 2020, at 3:29 PM, Andy Townsend <ajt1047 at gmail.com> wrote:
> https://web.archive.org/web/20190225133138/http://ma3t.co.uk/euanmills/euanmills/tifd.html
> Basically, someone wrote an academic dissertation finding out the answer to that question.

It's one-screen-easy to see the graphed results, quite a neat link (thank you, Andy).  But why a 2019 article is in the "waybackmachine" (web.archive.org) I don't know; I don't FULLY understand the 'net.  (Does anyone?  No need to answer).

Having walked London a fair bit, I'd say this is partly that London's conurbations are both formal and what the author calls "social" (it's easy to agree with a well-displayed result of a scientific method).  Lots of blending and overlap happen in the minds of even the people walking the very streets of London.  Fascinating.  Turns verifiability around like a spinning top.

Maybe what we're bumping up against (dare I say it?) is that there are truly "authoritative" data and there are polls of people walking the streets of their own neighborhoods...(wait for it) and sometimes these do not agree.  OSM, in our quest to get our minds around what we mean by "verifiability" (thank you for that excellent Diary entry, Christoph) might consider that.  There is "what is" and there is "what people say there is."  We even have courts, judges and lawyers to untangle these things, which sometimes start from basic misunderstandings of "what is."  Let's be careful!

SteveA


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