[Tagging] Admin Boundary admin_centre or label roles

[tguen at tutanota.com]

> In reality, places have all sorts of weirdly shaped boundaries, and what
> counts as 'the middle' for people is often a long way from the centroid
> or any other mathematically derived centre. The current generation of
> renderers cannot always place the labels in a suitable location based
> solely on the boundary data.
>
> In some other cases, the position of the label is also strongly
> influenced by cultural factors. For mediaeval cities there is often an
> old city centre that is in the minds of the populace 'the middle' where
> such a label should appear at a low zoom level.
>
To me this is the whole point of the label role in boundary relations. If renderers used it, tagging the nodes would not be needed.

> It would also come down to deciding unilaterally that mappers being able
> to influence the location of place labels is 'bad and unwanted'.
>
Again, this is true regardless of whether a place is mapped as a node, or a node has the label role in a relation. Replacing the former with the latter doesn't change this.

> You would instantly break many OpenStreetMap styles that rely on those
> for rendering places from city down to neighbourhood. The status quo
> appears to be that renderers need not interpret boundary relations
> because a node is expected to be present as well. Moving away from that
> to a system of either a node (in case the boundaries are not known) or a
> boundary relation would in my opinion need broad consensus and a longer
> term planning for renderers and underlying dependencies to be able to
> update their implementations, because it would break the map in a
> significant way (i.e., many place names disappearing).
>
Sounds like we tolerate a worse way of mapping to avoid breaking renderers. Renderers probably refuse to change because it works the way it is. So the situation will not improve unless we decide to set a cutoff date when we no longer guarantee that a place node will exist, and notify renderers. It sounds like a proposal is needed to get this process started.

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