[talk-au] Administration level for unincorporated areas

[stevea]

Thanks, I appreciate your clarifications, cleary.  Yes, for at least a decade, the more-subtle nuances of how each country does this (at sub-national levels) have had many discussions, these continue today.  It can be easy for others (or newer contributors) to misunderstand, I and others find it is helpful when these things are well-documented.  Your arcgis link for NSW is helpful.  So would be a regional / Oz-specific wiki that gets down to the granularity of shires (where a structure is denoted, but the details are in the map data).  It can't be overstated enough that a 7 here isn't a 7 there, a 9 there may not exist in this 2-4-5-6-7-8 world, but it might in another, neighboring sub-national jurisdiction, which also happens to omit 5s.  Each area is unique, even as it may share "rough structure" and similarities with many or most around it.  There is a way to denote (document) this that hits a sweet spot of "enough of a hierarchy described" without getting lost in too big a table or too much detail.

In the USA, we've been hammering on [1] for 13 or 14 years and [2] for 7 years by many, these help us clarify what we mean, even if we don't always agree amongst ourselves (initially...we do get closer to agreement and understanding over time) regarding what we mean, exactly.  For example, in three New England states (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont), even in 2023-4, there still remains some work being done about exactly how we denote below 6 down to 9, and whether unincorporated and incorporated (words like "village" can and do mean different things in different places) applies, with wiki updates, light tune-ups to our data, OverpassTurbo links to display "with certain rules" (and colors and shadings) what the current data are...these kinds of endeavors are ongoing.  And improving, thanks to ongoing dialog and good documentation.  Both can usually improve, if these sorts of questions remain open.

G'day to you there!

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