[Talk-ca] First nations boundary tagging

[stevea]

I'll add that in the USA, we seem to eschew explicitly defining "unincorporated areas" [1] with explicit (multi)polygon boundaries, where we say

"It does not appear that OSM needs to (or can) explicitly delineate unincorporated areas in a relation as boundary=administrative. For these communities, tag a node with name=* and place=*, as appropriate, omitting the admin_level=* tag in all cases (on a node)."

We also link to [2] where our (United States-based) wiki offers "current best practice" rules of thumb for such place=* nodes (place=city, place=hamlet, place=suburb...) as we tag them in the USA.

And just as I was about to click Send on this, I received David's reply that boundary=political isn't for REGIONAL district electoral areas (RDEAs) in BC, but are used for Canada's FEDERAL electoral districts.  That's fine.  It even underscores that there is a good (existing in OSM) reason to not use explicit boundaries for RDEAs, similar to how in the USA, we choose to (tend to?) use nodes (only) for these, as it can be difficult to draw / characterize such unincorporated areas — in many/most/all cases, these don't have explicit boundaries, but are rather better characterized as "surrounding a place centered with a node."  However, as the (rather complex) boundaries for RDEAs in Canada DO seem to be "drawn already," I'll leave to Canadians how to tag these.  Or, you might choose to use nodes, or another OSM solution.

I politely "bow out" of this one here and now.

[1] https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/United_States_admin_level#Unincorporated_areas
[2] https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/United_States/Tags#Places