[Talk-GB] place=village/town/city

SK53 sk53.osm at gmail.com
Fri Feb 12 11:15:37 UTC 2016


Like you I would certainly expect Kirkcaldy & Dunfermerline as place=towns.
They were elevated to this status only in the past 2 months, after having
been towns on OSM since 2007. I'll restore them to that status.

Unfortunately the rules for places described on the wiki are poorly
conceived and are not generally applied in the UK: they led to many inner
post-industrial suburbs of US cities being labelled as hamlets. In practice
common usage, and local knowledge are what matter. It would be pretty
unusual to change the status of a village/town on OSM in the UK now as most
of these represent a tacit consensus about the choice of tag.

Large villages of the size of yours are often edge cases between village
and town.

Personally I usually find some knowledge of the history of a place as a
guide. In S. Nottinghamshire we have several places with populations near
10,000, but many of them have grown in size very recently: either as
dormitory commuter suburbs (Keyworth, Ravenshead) or as colliery villages
(Cotgrave). On the other hand both Bingham & East Leake which have also
experienced considerable growth post-war, were also significant places
before that. Bingham also has a market place which implies a town-like role
long ago.

Obvious towns in an area of Scotland I know well, Argyll, all less than
10,000 are Oban, Dunoon, Campbeltown, Lochgilphead and Rothesay. Even
Inveraray counts. Most of these would have been Burghs. These illustrate
that it is not possible to apply a hard and fast rule about population, but
instead that (like a lot of tags in OSM) one needs to use situational
knowledge which reflects the role of a given place in its local context.
This tends ot mean the threshold for town-ness is low in sparsely populated
areas.

Jerry



On 11 February 2016 at 21:32, Michael Booth <boothym at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all, new mapper with a question about the place=* tag.
>
> I noticed my town (population 6,000+) was tagged as place=village, so I
> looked at the wiki and also other places in my council area before making
> any changes.
>
> The wiki gives a suggestion to go by population: city > 100,000; town >
> 10,000; village < 10,000, > 200. But if we do that there will surely be
> differences when compared to how these places are commonly or legally
> perceived?
>
> In Scotland, only four cities are above 100,000:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_towns_and_cities_in_Scotland_by_population
> - so should Perth, Inverness and Stirling be downgraded to towns in OSM?
> Currently Dunfermline and Kirkcaldy are tagged (wrongly IMO) as cities -
> should they be changed to towns?
>
> Same goes for towns/villages - I've seen places tagged as villages when
> smaller places are marked as towns. Or places which Wikipedia refers to as
> villages, but are tagged as towns and vice-versa.
>
> So my question is, how are we defining villages, towns and cities? Only by
> population, or do we also take into account their generally accepted status
> (whilst trying to be consistent across the country)?
>
> Thanks!
>
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