[talk-au] admin_level, suburbs and rendering; should the order be updated?

[stevea]

I will and do (cautiously, as an "outsider" from the USA, but as an "insider" being one who seriously coordinated the USA [1] getting our 4-10 admin_level table(s) [2] about as hammered-into-submission-and-consensus as is humanly OSM-possible, over months and years and sweat and tears) say one thing:

Assigning admin_level=8 to Postcode Borders simply isn't correct.  Mail delivery areas are not administrative boundaries.  They might be convenient, but they should be boundary=postal_code, not boundary=admin_level (see, that is a direct collision in the key boundary for exactly the right reason:  one is not the other).

(In the USA, postal_codes, what we call ZIP Codes — Zone/Improvement/Plan — are more like routing algorithms for efficient mail delivery.  They absolutely do not describe geographic regions and it is essentially geographically impossible to make them do so).

The other proposed changes to Australia's table?  I step aside, good Australian OSM Contributors.

SteveA

[1] https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/United_States_admin_level
[2] https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/United_States/Boundaries