[Talk-GB] Village, Hamlet and populations ...

[SK53]

Not strictly speaking true: I can instantly think of a counter example
Market Harborough which is clearly a town with a charter from the 13th
century, but ecclesiastically established as a chapel-at-ease to Great
Bowden (see Hosking (1955), *The Making of the English Landscape*, p.
227-228). Railway towns may provide other, more recent examples, the one I
can think of are rather further afield: Rotkreuz
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risch-Rotkreuz>near Luzern (part of Risch,
until 2007 when civil parish renamed).

All this discussion highlights is that it is nigh-on impossible to define
simple criteria for choosing which value to use for the place key. 11 years
of experience in OSM shows that using a single criterion, such as
population, is not sensible.

On the other hand finding a way to access population figures to places for
data consumers is useful. Directly adding population values may work in
Britain where population change is relatively slow, so slowly outdated data
is still useful, but is risky in other parts of the world. At the very
lease also add a link to wikipedia/wikidata as well, which ultimately
should obviate having to maintain population values

Jerry

On 14 September 2015 at 08:53, Mark Goodge <mark at good-stuff.co.uk> wrote:

> On 14/09/2015 00:41, Tom Hughes wrote:
>
>> On 14/09/15 00:16, Lester Caine wrote:
>>
>> The OSM wiki defines 'hamlet' as less than 100-200 people, but village
>>> supposedly starts at 1000 up to 10000 with the proviso that it depends
>>> on the country. Ideally the two would perhaps meet :) We are perhaps
>>> looking at a population of around 8000 for a town designation in the UK,
>>> but anything down to 100 is still classified as a village by the ONS.
>>> What are actually missing from the OSN data are ANY hamlets despite
>>> their claiming to include them.
>>>
>>
>> Please don't try and draw bright lines based on population, and
>> certainly don't try and mass edit things based on that. It's much more
>> subjective than that.
>>
>> Nobody would ever have described the place where I grew up as anything
>> other than a town, but we always used to reckon on a population of
>> around 3000 people (wikipedia says 5627 as of the 2011 census) and
>> certainly 8000 sounds very high to me.
>>
>
> Historically, the distinction between a hamlet, a village and a town was
> based on ecclesiastical parishes. A village was a populated area comprising
> a parish of its own, with one parish church. A town was a contiguous
> populated area comprising multiple ecclesiastical parishes, while a hamlet
> was a populated area too small to have its own parish (and thus being
> contained within another one, either a village parish or an outlying area
> of a town parish).
>
> This official distinction has been lost over the years with multiple
> phases of local government reorganisation, but it still provides a good
> rule of thumb.
>
> In England and Wales, a civil parish council can choose to style itself a
> town council if it wishes. The majority of those which have done so are
> those which, prior to the Local Government Act 1972, would have been a
> Municipal Borough (eg, Evesham or Lewes) and which meet the historical
> definition of a town, but by no means all of them fall into this category.
>
> What that means is that population alone is a no more than a rough guide
> to the likely status of a town or village, at least in England and Wales.
> There's a significant overlap between the largest villages and the smallest
> towns.
>
> Mark
> --
> http://www.markgoodge.com
>
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