[Talk-us] Differences with USA admin_level tagging

[Greg Troxel]

Greg Troxel <gdt at lexort.com> writes:

> In many new england states you list Town as 7 and City as 8.  As a
> local, this makes no sense to me.

I misspoke about "you", sorry.  Let me try again:

At
  https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States_admin_level

it says that in Massachusetts,

  Town should be tagged as 7, and City as 8.

This is just plain wrong, and I don't know where it came from.  I think
it's based on the notion that there is a thing "Township" between county
and city.  The text above on the page says:

   found in all of the northeastern states known as New England and most
   Midwestern states is a government between county and city called
   "township,"

and this is clearly incorrect for Massachusetts.  The word "township" is
not used at all in our state, and "towns" are peers of "cities", equal
in all respects except for minor form of government differences, and
they do not overlap.  I also think it's incorrect for at least most
other New England states, but I am not certain.

I see someone (you?) has aligned the table with dobratzp's suggestions.
That's great progress.

I fixed the incorrect statement about townships, narrowing to CT, on the
theory that it's far better to omit a fact which might be true than to
have an incorrect statement.


Also, the text says:

  while in New England, governments tend toward weak-county /
  strong-city, to where in at least one state, "county" vanishes
  entirely.

This may be sort of true, but I think it should be dropped.

Reading the discussion page, Dobratzp's revision to the table seems
right to me (except that I don't understand CT so will refrain from
commenting on it)..  As a nit, I think precincts within towns should be
10, to match city, not 9.  A town basically has 1 ward, which shouldn't
promote precinct.  (Plus, I'm not sure we should map wards and precincts
anyway.)


And thanks for digging into fixing this.  It is interesting but not
shocking that we are finding that the locals curating the data are right
and the wiki is not.
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