OpenStreetMap
City, Town, Village, Locality: Description Rewording
Posted by joelmatos on 24 August 2017 in English.I noticed that the wiki describes City, Town, Village and Locality to be named based on a determined size.
Example: Use place=town to identify an important urban centre that is larger than a place=village, smaller than a place=city, and not a place=suburb. Towns normally have a good range of shops and facilities which are used by people from nearby villages.
My suggestion is that includes the local legal/administrative size denomination. Many countries have a legal/administrative approved size for naming for City, Town, Village, Locality.
Discussion
Comment from TomH on 24 August 2017 at 10:38
Yes, and then you get “cities” in the US with a population of two people and a dog and the importance to match.
There’s a reason things like this need to be based on country specific knowledge. The OSM names shouldn’t be read literally but rather should be considered roughly as a hierarchy of importance and then country specific rules can be used to map local definitions to those categories.
Comment from joelmatos on 24 August 2017 at 10:46
Right Tom, I was only thinking of me country…. .
I guess your wording should be added to OSM:
The OSM names shouldn’t be read literally but rather should be considered roughly as a hierarchy of importance and then country specific rules can be used to map local definitions to those categories.
Thanks!
Comment from Glassman on 24 August 2017 at 15:33
Another option would be to rank cities, villages, etc., by how active the OSM community is in that area. It certainly would be a more interesting presentation, at least to us.
Comment from Warin61 on 24 August 2017 at 23:11
Many localities (villages, towns) have no local OSM community .. are these to be left off the map?
‘Country rules’? If you mean the local legal/administrative rules then they can be politically influenced resulting in a false impression of the relative size/importance between adjacent places.
The present OSM wiki wording on places is the result of lots of though, it does not fit well in some countries, it does not fit well with legal/administrative designations.. but it does allow for a reasoned map to be made.