[Talk-GB] Town v City (again, sorry!)

[SomeoneElse]

This was last discussed back in February:

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/2014-February/015867.html

when someone (in the UK) changed a number of place=city to place=town.  
The discussion at the time covered:


1) "place=city" in OSM might or might not not mean the same as "is a 
ceremonial city, as defined in the UK"

2) We need some way to represent ceremonial city, if it's not to be 
"place=city"

3) There's also a "subjective local importance" factor (Cambridge > 
Bedford was mentioned)

4) A scheme that coincided with what's done globally would be preferred 
over anything UK specific.

5) We need to decide on something and document it.

(apologies if I'm misrepresenting or missing anyone's views here)


The reason that I'm dragging this up again is that a number of changes 
were made in changesets such as:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/21837294 
<http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/21837294>

I'd have expected any mass-change of cities and towns in the UK and 
Ireland to at least try and discuss the change beforehand, which didn't 
happened (someone on #osm-ie has already said that the changes to Galway 
and Waterford were not correct according to their understanding).  I may 
be over-paranoid, but the description of the Wolverhampton change above 
as "town (near city)" does suggest that there's a certain amount of "for 
the renderer" going on here too.

I'll ask the author of the changes what criteria they were using for 
their changes, but in the meantime I guess we need to try and come to 
some sort of decision as to what "place=city" in OSM means in the UK.

Cheers,

Andy


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