[Talk-ro] Administrative subdivisions of Romania

[Frederik Ramm]

Dear Romanian OSMers,

    I'm sorry for writing in English, my Romanian is a bit rusty ;)

I am writing about administrative divisions.

On the admin_level page in the wiki,

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:admin_level#admin_level

the following is listed for Romania:

admin_level 2 = "the country border"

admin_level 3 = "the boundaries of historical provinces (Transylvania, 
Moldavia ...), but I don't think they will ever be drawn, as these are 
not administrative boundaries any more."

(The "I" in the sentence above is not me but whoever wrote that entry on 
the Wiki.)

admin_level 4 = "Counties (Judeţe) and the Municipality of Bucharest"

In reality however, if one looks at the geographical hierarchy of 
relations tagged boundary=administrative, there is one layer between the 
country border and the counties, and this layer consists of the 
following relations:

1426985 Vest
1427500 Centru
427498 Nord-Est
1426802 Sud-Est
1427499 Nord-Vest
1426984 Sud-Vest
1426803 Sud

They do not have an admin_level (which is unusual for relations tagged 
boundary=administrative). From Wikipedia I gather that these are 
so-called "development regions".

I would like to suggest that you/we do one of two things:

* Either remove the "boundary=administrative" tag from these relations 
if they are not administrative boundaries.

* Or leave the "boundary=administrative" in place, but then add 
admin_level=3 and modify the description in the Wiki accordingly (i.e. 
write that admin_level 3 is now used for development regions).

Even if the development areas do not strictly play an administrative
role, there are some precendents in OSM where admin_level 3 is used
for a widely-used regional grouping, so it would not be entirely wrong 
to use admin_level=3 even if development areas don't have regional 
governments.

I can make such a change but I wanted to hear the locals first ;)

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"