[OSM-talk] Lot's of locality names in an otherwise empty area
Sebastian Arcus
s.arcus at open-t.co.uk
Wed Nov 23 09:54:57 UTC 2016
On 21/11/16 12:49, Andy Townsend wrote:
> On 21/11/2016 11:42, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
>> Sebastian Arcus wrote:
>>> Well, looking at the map, it looks like each and every parcel of
>>> land and section of field has a locality tag associated with it.
>> It's very common in the UK, too, for uninhabited sections of woodland and
>> hillside to have placenames.
>
> ... and fields, of course. Where I was brought up the names in use were
> mostly just descriptive ("The Twenty Acre Field", "Piggy Thompson's
> Fields", etc.), but they were in OSM terms at least "loc_names". Very
> few were verifable beyond "find a local old person and ask them" though.
>
> However "names on a map" doesn't always mean "names of places". Ordnance
> Survey data in the UK is riddled with them, and some are little more
> than historic names. Anything that's taken OS data on board without
> local vetting will share that problem. As an example,
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_End,_Derbyshire was originally a
> "village" in wikipedia; it got changed to the curious "a place noted on
> a map" at
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Common_End,_Derbyshire&diff=next&oldid=302498425
> when various people (including me, who has lived down the road for 30
> years) said "it's not actually a village!".
>
> Obviously names change over time. In the Common End case I suspect it
> was never much more than a farm, like Owlcotes to the north (another
> "place" according to OS maps). Another example of that is here:
>
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/54.5567/-8.2094
>
> There there's a modern village ("Rossnowlagh") but two townlands
> ("Rossnowlagh Upper" http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/5625290 and
> "Rossnowlagh Lower" http://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/5625293).
> Those two were also imported as
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/5224127 and
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/52242180. The "Upper" and "Lower"
> versions aren't signed on the ground and aren't villages any more
> (though likely once had significant populations); the modern village
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2349484921/history I added based on
> survey, after checking with #osm-ie what best to do.
>
>
>>> it still seems a bit odd - and begs the question if those tags
>>> really need to be there.
>> Why not? Be conservative in what you change/delete in OSM, be liberal in
>> what you add.
>
> Indeed - but there's no harm in asking the question, and as Colin Smale
> said yesterday, the logical people to ask, if you can't find a local
> 80-year-old, are the people that added it.
Thank you everybody - this has been an enlightening thread!
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