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

[David Earl]

If you want to know population, we should use a population tag. Given 
its history, much as we might like to pretend otherwise, place=city etc 
really *is* no more than an arbitrary hint to the renderer, and not much 
good either because it doesn't reflect the other criteria that would 
determine how prominent a place appears on a map. And of course those 
criteria would differ depending on what and who the map is for. Until 
there is another more diverse way of working out prominence, we'll keep 
going round in circles on this one.

Current definition notwithstanding, I think I favour the place value 
being what people locally say the place is - if they think they are a 
city, then by the "what you see on the ground" method of mapping, that 
is what it is.

But how the place (label in particular) is represented on a map ought to 
be up to that renderer, probably based on some weighted average of 
various criteria, perhaps including that local subjective judgement, the 
population bracket, home of an important institution, ...

For example, on car maps I think there's an argument for bumping up the 
prominence of the set of place names used on green/blue (trunk/motorway) 
road signs in the UK, because of their usefulness in navigation. Scotch 
Corner is useful in this respect, but tiny (is it even a village?).

David