[Talk-us] GNIS POI populations

[Paul Norman]

On 1/13/2015 5:34 AM, Minh Nguyen wrote:
> It looks like most of the place=city/town/village/hamlet POIs from 
> GNIS are tagged with 2000 Census populations in the population tag. 
> These population tags allow renderers to label places with font sizes 
> corresponding to population, which is a pretty common use case.

I had done a PR which would have added population sorting for place 
names, but as a style maintainer I'm interested in what styles use 
population for sizes.

> I think we should consider a mechanical edit to update these tags to 
> the 2010 Census figures en masse. I've been updating individual places 
> as I edit them for other reasons, but this tag is most useful when its 
> vintage is consistent across the board. 
Although I somewhat like the idea of updating the population tags, I 
think we should give higher priority to fixing their tagging. When I did 
some cleanup of Washington place=city POIs I found that I ended up 
retagging most, deleting many, and only a few were place=city.