[Talk-us] [Imports-us] [Talk-us-newyork] LAST CALL - Retagging of place nodes in NewYork State

[D. Joe]

On Tue, Sep 06, 2022 at 02:22:43PM -0700, Minh Nguyen wrote:
> Vào lúc 09:49 2022-09-06, D. Joe đã viết:
> >
> >First, to be clear, I do not support changing the New York State place= tags as proposed.
> 
> Can you elaborate on your concerns or link to where you've previously
> brought them up, for the benefit of those who are only aware of the proposal
> due to this last call?

I began to address them in an earlier email.

The core of my concern is 

> I'm deeply uneasy at the thought of a proposed scheme for tagging places in New York based on arbitrary population threshholds, while in the process overloading and obscuring how those terms are used every day in the state, eg, city, town, village, hamlet. 

from

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us-newyork/2022-August/000187.html

I had asked

> Or maybe the population information could be carried by a different tag? 

because I wasn't conversant with the popululation= tag to that point.

It seems that this scheme brings no further information to bear than what that tag already presents, merely stretching that information further into a crude binning.

What's more, it does so at the expense of, at the best, perpetrating the confusion borne of having multiple administrative areas with the same name that are either adjacent, or overlap. At worst, it creates further confusion of its own by adding yet another thing that would carry something idiosyncratically OSM's alone. 

Population alone cannot be the arbiter of what constitutes any given type of place, otherwise we might perpetrate absurdities like calling Montana a city: Thin as the population is, if we encompass all within its boundaries we get a bustling "metropolis" of a million people.

The context-dependent qualitative aspect is acknowledged, at least briefly and in part, in the description of place=city at

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:place#Populated_settlements,_urban

> The largest urban settlement or settlements within the territory.

It's not the "largest" but also a "settlement" taken in the context of the surrounding "territory". 

Thank you for correcting the links for the list of examples. Now that they are useful, I'll try to make reference to them to address some specific examples in a subsequent email.