[Talk-us-massachusetts] Barnstable MA a collection of villages

[Greg Troxel]

"Alan & Ruth Bragg" <alan.ruth.bragg at gmail.com> writes:

> Yes, I agree.

Good - it's great to have some agreement!

> How about https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:place=borough
> "Use place <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:place>=borough to
> identify a part in larger place
> <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:place>=city
> <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:place%3Dcity> grouped into
> administrative unit."
> Manhattan uses this identifier.
>
> For example
> Relation: Rose Hill (8398102)
> Districts of Manhattan added. Mainly based on
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data:Neighbourhoods/New_York_City.map and
> Wikipedia

I think it makes sense in NY but wrong in Barnstable.

First, I think you mean this to tag a place, which is in the hierarchy
of populated places, and this is distinct from both addresses and admin
boundaries, which are two other things we have names and tags for.  Is
this a correct interpretation?

I think there is a lot of wikifiddiling where people engage in writing
descriptions of new tags that they invent, vs following established
practice and trying to describe the world.  I don't know if this is that
or not, but to me it place:borough raises the danger flag.

We have a long tradition of the hierarchy of populated  places, and we
had a GNIS import long ago.  The Federal Board of Geographic Names has a
database (GNIS) of recognized names for places, with populations.

The place key is really messy business, because the reality is messy.  I
see there borough as part of city, and to me that is only appropriate
for a named part of something that is properly labeled a city.  In areas
that are not urban, then town/village/hamlet is appropriate.  Barnstable
(the town) is nowhere near urban in this sense, so using borough seems
wrong.

place tags are about locations that people would view as population/town
centers.  So it makes sense to have place tags for the downtowns,
choosing among town/village/hamlet depending on how many people are
considered to be associated with the place.

There used to be a table of population, with town IIRC 10-100K or so,
village 5Kish, hamlet 500ish.  But I can't find that.



So if you want to add place=town for Hyannis, and others that have a lot
of people, and place=village for the rest, as nodes in the "downtowns"
of each, that sounds good to me.  I don't think the tagging there should
be any different because of the weird admin_level; non-city places at
least should be tagged basically without regard to admin_level.

How does that sound?