[Talk-GB] addr:place cleanup process

Mark Goodge mark at good-stuff.co.uk
Sat Jan 15 12:25:55 UTC 2022



On 14/01/2022 19:07, Rob Nickerson wrote:
> 
> If you have an address which has some settlement name before the postal 
> town then there are only ever two tags that you need: addr:suburb and 
> addr:city. The case we haven't yet worked out how to handle is when the 
> address includes 3 settlements / settlement sub areas ("locality 
> elements" in RM language). At that point we use addr:suburb for the 
> smallest, addr:city for the largest and an as yet undefined tag for the 
> middle.
> 
> So "suburb" in addr:suburb should also not be interpreted based on our 
> view of what a suburb is or isn't.

The problem with this is that it goes against the normal meaning of the 
word "suburb" in British English. Not every OSM editor is reading this 
list, and not every OSM editor is going to read the wiki. So not every 
editor is going to realise that "suburb" means something different in 
OSM to what it does in everyday use. Which means that people will, 
whether you want them to or not, use addr:hamlet, addr:village, 
addr:town or whatever seems most appropriate, because they simply don't 
know that OSM addr:* tags don't follow normal English usage, and, 
without reading either the wiki or this list, have no way of knowing.

It seems to me there are really only three possible solutions to this:

1. Find some way to prevent people adding or editing addr:* tags until 
they have shown they have read and understood the wiki.

2. Have an ongoing project of repeatedly correcting the wrong use of 
addr:* tags.

3. Stop caring about it, and accept that, in the UK, addr:* tags will 
be, and can be, duck-tagged.

The first may seem attractive (and would result in a much cleaner 
dataset), but I really don't see how it could be enforced. The second is 
a lot of work, and is likely to result in edit wars where people think 
that their edits are being wrongly changed by people who don't 
understand the situation on the ground ("No, Kidsgrove isn't a suburb of 
Stoke-on-Trent, it's a town in its own right"). So it seems to me that 
only the last is a practical choice. It may upset the purists, but if we 
genuinely want to encourage more OSM users to become OSM editors then we 
need to accept that commonly used tags have to follow normal English 
usage rather than requiring people to adopt non-standard and 
non-intuitive terminology.

Mark



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