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

[Greg Troxel]

"D. Joe" <osm+joe at etrumeus.com> writes:

> I think a lot of the things this attempts to fix are messiness not so
> much in the data, but in the reality on the ground, and in OSM's use
> of terms like "suburb" and "town" in a way that is contrary to how
> they are widely used not just in New York, but in much of the US.[1] I
> think the proposed changes propagate those problems rather than fix
> them. But by objecting, nor am I going to fix them here.

The use of hamlet/village/town/city and suburb in OSM is absolutely
contrary to how those words are used in US government, and that has
nothing in particular to do with New York.

In OSM, they started out as a hierarchy based on population, likely
following English usage.

In Massachusetts, as an example, there are political subdivisions
(admin_level=8) tiling the state.   Some are called "city" and some are
called "town".  While it's true that those called city tend to be
larger, which word is used is determined by form of government (city
council vs town meeting, more or less), not population.   And things
called towns vary from very small (a few hundred people) to probably
most of 100K.

The point of the OSM terminology is to label small vs large places
(people wise).  It is therefore not going to line up with usage of
similar terms that use the same words.

If you think that isn't ok, it's a far larger conversation, and a
proposal for a signficant departure from longstanding practice.  What
Kevin is doing is rationalizing tags based on an expert local
understanding of populations and government in NY, aligning them to
broad longstanding OSM practice.  I only partially follow this as NY
local government is so complicated it makes my head hurt, compared to my
state -- but it's really obvious Kevin is the expert among us for NY.
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