[Talk-GB] Suburbs in London/Brum - big edits

John Baker rovastar at hotmail.com
Wed Nov 19 17:26:38 UTC 2014


Lets put some clarity on this.

a) they are not big edits. They are a handful of nodes.
b) "advice now given in the wiki" and "self-appointed wiki editors" implies that suddenly some rouge wiki editor changed something that in general the OSM community doesn't agree with. Suburbs are well established. In fact that description line is over 3 years old! And from that pages inception in September 2006 there is a similar line of text about not using village, etc and using suburbs, etc. Even for someone that doesn't like change it is hardly a rapid, sweeping one.

To be honest I have never noticed (and have mapped plenty in London) before but it sounds like the reasons to keep it as is for, Peckham as a village or whatever, is a clear case of mapping for the renderer.

Maybe we should also look at how other large international cities have mapped these areas.

I am all for changes some/many/all of these to a more correct and modern (well post 09/2006) standard.
 
From: tom at acrewoods.net
Date: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 10:07:16 +0000
To: talk-gb at openstreetmap.org
Subject: [Talk-GB] Suburbs in London/Brum - big edits

Hello there,
As somebody who dislikes change, I was slightly horrified to see these edits:https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/26783815https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/26795471
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/26567938

The user has changed a whole lot of places within London and Birmingham that were tagged as town / village / hamlet / etc. to place=suburb. He appears to be following the advice now given on the wiki, that:
"Areas of a town/city should not be tagged with place=town, place=village or place=hamlet. These should only be used for distinct settlements."
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:place%3Dsuburb

Apart from the fact that I cannot stand it when the work of self-appointed wiki editors leads to somebody making sweeping edits of others' work, I also really don't like losing the hierarchy of place implicit in Wimbledon being marked as a town, Forest Hill a village, Belleden a hamlet, and so on, and them all just becoming 'suburb'. Apart from the fact that many places in London were historically towns in their own right, they are often also regarded as town centres.
But should we swallow this and move to the use of place=suburb/quarter/neighbourhood?
If so, I'd like to do this properly, instead of the process that this user has gone through to just make everything 'suburb'.
Regards,Tom


-- 
http://tom.acrewoods.net   http://twitter.com/tom_chance


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