[Talk-GB] ref:hectares on admin boundary, and non-responsive mapper

[Will Phillips]

Hi,

This user is currently adding admin_level=10 admin boundaries, which we 
use for civil parishes (or communities), to areas where no such 
administrative unit exists. To me this seems problematic because my 
understanding is that these are legal entities which either exist or 
they don't. Additionally, it makes OSM boundary data harder to use. If I 
run a query to find which boundaries a node is within, I'd only expect 
real admin boundary areas to be returned. The user is adding designation 
tags (designation=non-civil_parish) to indicate they aren't real, but 
this is undocumented and data users shouldn't have to check a secondary 
tag to find out whether a relation is a real civil parish or not.

The aim seems to be to improve the results returned by Nominatim and 
other geocoders, but surely this is the wrong way to go about it.

Here is an example of one of these non-civil parish relations covering 
the whole of the City of Nottingham, where no such administrative unit 
has ever existed: http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/6448042

I have raised this issue with the user directly but the tone has turned 
unpleasant and to me feels quite threatening.  I accept my initial 
comment suggesting that one of these relations should be deleted could 
have been worded much more tactfully, but I don't feel in justifies his 
aggressive responses since. I was frustrated at finding one of the these 
non-existent boundaries covering my local area with an inaccurate name.

Will

On 15/08/2016 08:39, Colin Smale wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I noticed a number of new admin boundaries have been tagged with 
> ref:hectares=* with the numeric value giving the area of the entity in 
> hectares. This feels to me like an inappropriate use of "ref" and also 
> redundant as the area can be calculated simply from the geometry 
> anyway. When I queried this with the mapper (user alexkemp) via a 
> changeset discussion [1] I got the following response:
>
> "This is an automated response: sorry, but I'm too busy mapping too be 
> able to spare the time to respond to you. Thank you for your interest 
> in my mapping. -Alex Kemp"
>
> Any thoughts about the tagging?
>
> Any thoughts about engaging the user? There is also a discussion on 
> another one of his changesets where he unilaterally diverged from the 
> established tagging [2].
>
> Colin
>
> [1] http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/41449409
>
> [2] http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/41371134
>
>
>
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