[Talk-GB] Town v City

[Andy Allan]

On 25 February 2014 09:47, Philip Barnes <phil at trigpoint.me.uk> wrote:

> City status is an honour granted by The Queen, not something that can be
> claimed by size or population. Like trunk roads, its quirky and like trunk
> roads I see it as the way we do things here.

Is that actually documented anywhere though?

I'm playing devils advocate here, since I've been annoyed in the past
to see Croydon tagged as a city when in my mind it's just a suburb of
London. But remember that it's up to us to choose what place=city
means in the context of OSM.

For example, we've rounded on our American colleages for tagging all
of their thousands of village-sized "Incorporated cities" as
place=city, and now they've changed them to villages and kept
place=city for, well, 'actual cities'. But then we go around saying
that towns like Ely and St Asaph are place=city, which smacks of dual
standards at best and probably even unhelpful tagging. Do consumers of
OSM data find it helpful that St Asaph is in the list of place=city
objects?

If anything, I'd like to amend the UK use of place=city to come up
with a use of the tag that fits in with global OSM usage. We can add a
tag for 'ceremonial status' or similar to indicate they are a 'city'
according to the weird UK rules but aren't actually cities in the main
meaning of the word. So long as it's all agreed and documented, I'd be
in favour of a change.

Cheers,
Andy