[Talk-GB] addr:place cleanup process

[Roger Calvert]

I tend to agree. I live in a hamlet 10 miles from the post town. In no 
way is it a suburb, and it seems irrational for it to be described as such.

Roger

On 15/01/2022 12:25, Mark Goodge wrote:
>
>
> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> Talk-GB mailing list
> Talk-GB at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Roger Calvert
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/attachments/20220115/424d908b/attachment.htm>