OpenStreetMap
Massachusetts town and county boundary relations complete!
Posted by fiveisalive on 10 September 2012 in English.massDOT and I have completed the cleanup of the town and county boundary relations (including the offshore portions) for the whole of Massachusetts. We’d appreciate help checking that all the relations are complete, links to the relations are on the Massachusetts/Boundary Relations wiki page.
Discussion
Comment from Peter Dobratz on 11 September 2012 at 02:55
Great! Thanks for working on that.
One thing that I’ve recently learned about boundary relations is that the Nominatim search engine uses wikipedia links to pull in additional information to build its search index. Also, at some point in the last few years, the format for OSM wikipedia tags has changed. On the relation, the tag should be something like:
wikipedia=en:Haverhill, Massachusetts
where en is for english and the text following the colon is the actual wikipedia title of the page (not the URL encoded form like Haverhill,_Massachusetts)
Comment from fiveisalive on 11 September 2012 at 05:53
Thanks, I have been using the format “wikipedia:en=Haverhill, Massachusetts” (I had seen that form used on some other relations in MA). I think I started doing that about 50% of my way through, so some of them are still missing the wikipedia tag. In any case, using “wikipedia:en=” seems to have the same effect as “wikipedia=en:” in that it generates correct URLs to the Wikipedia page but that maybe a fluke.
Comment from Peter Dobratz on 11 September 2012 at 14:41
From what I understand, the preferred method is to put the language prefix in the tag value (wikipedia=en:Haverhill, Massachusetts) and have the tag key just be “wikipedia” without any language specification.
Comment from fiveisalive on 11 September 2012 at 19:16
Thanks, looking at the OSM wiki page on the “wikipedia” tag: osm.wiki/Wikipedia it seems that it first mentions the “wikipedia=language:page title” format at the top, but later it refers to using the “wikipedia:lang=page title” format, for cases that don’t seem different to the main use case. So this page seems to be the source of confusion.
In either case, feel free to fix or add the “wikipedia” tag where I’ve missed them. :)
Comment from Sanderd17 on 12 September 2012 at 08:09
Thank you for the boundaries. They’re extremely important for a good search.
As for the Wikipedia link, you know that the boundaries now also get rendered in Wikipedia when a correct link is provided? You can see it by clicking on the little map icon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts
The German wikipedia uses a different rendering (mostly standard Mapnik, but with localised names) but for this page, it seems to be missing the coordinates template.