[Talk-us] Hamlets!

[Scott Rollins]

On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 8:07 PM, Serge Wroclawski <emacsen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Their presence doesn't hurt anything, aside from the small
>> geocoding hiccup or map not rendering optimally.
>
> The map should reflect ground reality, so unless there are hamlets in
> these places, we should strive to fix them. By sharing our
> experiences, we can have a better sense of how others are doing that,
> and we can use that to inform our local decisions.

Of course, some of these small areas are names that mean something to
the locals, but one can be only a couple of miles away and not have
any idea where these places are, if one isn't actually in the
neighborhood often!

I happened to come across a couple of GNIS hamlets when I was doing
some work and I changed a couple of them to neighborhoods because I
knew they weren't hamlets and, while I hadn't heard of them, I wasn't
certain enough of what different areas in this city are called to just
delete them, so I changed them to neighborhood points and left them
for another day.

Then, a couple of days later, I saw a city press release abour road
construction on a major intersection in that area, and it used the
name of one of the hamlets I'd changed to a neighborhood. I've lived
here for two years now, and worked here for a couple more, only about
2-3 miles from this spot, and I had never heard the name until this
month.

In some cases, deletion may be obvious, but I'm not sure it's always
easy to know whether deletion or some other type of place more
accurate than hamlet should be used, especially if one does not live
within that immediate area. There is no question that they should be
fixed...but the question is: is the information that is misrepresented
as hamlets information that we should be preserving under more
accurate tagging?

Scott

--
Scott Rollins, <organist at gmail.com>
Portsmouth, VA