[OSM-talk] National borders in the British Islands

[Shaun McDonald]

On 29 May 2008, at 11:41, Dermot McNally wrote:

> 2008/5/29 Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net>:
>> Dermot McNally wrote:
>>
>>> 2008/5/29 Steve Chilton <S.L.Chilton at mdx.ac.uk>:
>>>> Scotland and Wales are countries.
>>>
>>> Only in the same traditional folk-consciousness way that Bavaria or
>>> Hessen are.
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom
>>
>> thinks it's a bit more than that.
>
> On the contrary - certainly in the case of Bavaria, which really was a
> country until 1918. But we've neatly illustrated the point.
> Non-Germans don't see why Bavaria would see itself as a country, even
> though it does. Non-British people (and, it seems, half of England)
> don't as a rule regard Scotland or Wales as countries on a par with,
> say, France. And as an Irish person, I've encountered my share of
> people who don't think my country is a real one either.
>

Seemingly a lot of people seem to regard the UK as England. It's not  
the first time someone's asked me what it's like in England. Until  
about 6 weeks ago I was unable to tell them because I had never lived  
in England until then.

Shaun

> But the clue here is that we're discussing the appropriate use of
> boundary tagging, specifically a thing we call admin_level. I guess
> none of us will disagree that Germany and the UK get to exercise a
> higher level of administration than a "country" like England or Wales?
>
> Dermot
>
> -- 
> --------------------------------------
> Iren sind menschlich
>
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at openstreetmap.org
> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/talk