OpenStreetMap
Now that I have been editing OSM’s Turkmenistan map for nearly three years, I feel confident enough to offer a suggested set of administrative levels. I invite one and all to take a look at my proposal at osm.wiki/Template:Admin_level_11 and offer constructive feedback. This proposal is based on my by now fairly good knowledge of the political structure of Turkmenistan and the way the hierarchy works.
The last two days have been fairly productive. Ann and I went exploring neighorhoods in Gypjak, Choganly, Taze Eyyam, and Taze Zaman where we were missing street names, numbers of schools, and such. We mostly filled in blanks in the map but also updated some streets in Taze Eyyam plus added a few in the new subdivision being built on the west side of Choganly. We visited the unidentified neighborhood on the northwest corner of the demolished former Ruhabat dacha community, which has absolutely no signs, but asked locals what it is called. They identified it as Galkynysh (Turkmen for “renaissance”), a neighborhood subordinate to the Choganly jurisdiction, which is part of the city of Ashgabat.
The Ruhabat dacha community is definitely gone. We drove through part of the territory, and crews were there watering saplings that have been planted where old imagery shows a dacha community.
Discussion
Comment from Harry Wood on 14 January 2018 at 21:37
I have general comments on the use of admin_level=11. This is not a desirable tag to be using because the initial conception of this tag was that it takes a value from 1 to 10. Simple.
Local countries then devise a mapping across from their administrative levels onto these numerical values. If you are finding your country needs to map across onto value 11, then it means something went wrong with that, and the mapping was devised badly in the first place.
To put it another way. Don’t look at this list of countries and say “hey I think we should join the club of countries with extra-fine-grained admin levels”. Instead you should think “Hopefully we can avoid joining this list of countries who have foolishly failed to map their admin level values correctly”.
Comment from apm-wa on 15 January 2018 at 04:01
Harry, thanks for the comment and the background. When I concocted this proposal, it was based on seeing how mappers before me had designed cities as admin_level=8 and then worked from there (the levels 0-7 seemed pretty cut and dried). The levels in Turkmenistan, as in particular the capital city of Ashgabat (which is run by the central government in reality), can be seen for example as
The 11th admin level arose when I discovered, while mapping street addresses, that some of the level 10 districts are not only further subdivided, but within them buildings numbers are unique and based on date of construction, not on location, meaning the address, for example, 3 Etrap, building 1 would be meaningless, since there is a building numbered 1 in both 3/1 Etrap and 3/2 Etrap. The only solution that presented itself to me was to create an 11th level.
Frederick Ramm and I corresponded briefly on this, and he commented that it is unusual for administrative subdivisions to be mapped in this level of detail (I recall he used the term ‘granular’). I replied that it is necessary in this case if the street addresses are to be routable and not to duplicate each other, which is one of the objectives of my effort. Maps should not led the user astray, I firmly believe.
Was the mapping devised badly in the first place in Turkmenistan? Probably so. If cities had been level 7, the problem of an 11th level would have been avoided. I started mapping here shortly after arrival three years ago and inherited an existent but largely out of date database, which I have updated and expanded. To go in now and do a wholesale revamp of inherited admin levels at this point goes far beyond the amount of time I have to devote to this hobby. That said, if you are willing…. :-) Or if anyone else out there is willing… :-)