Talk:Mechanical edits/ke9tv New York State place nodes

Elmira

The Town of Elmira is a town. The City of Elmira is a city within the Town of Elmira. They can't both be towns. Same thing for Binghamton. RussNelson (talk) 02:59, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

Correct. There are about a dozen cases in NY where a chartered City is carved out of a Town of the same name. In those cases, the place=city, place=town or place=village designates the chartered City, and the Town is labeled with a place=municipality node. The boundary relations are named "City of Elmira" and "Town of Elmira" respectively; have the appropriate links to SWIS, GNIS, FIPS code, Wikipedia, and Wikidata; and are labeled with border_type=town and border_type=city respectively, so the boundary between them will be marked "City of Elmira" on one side and "Town of Elmira" on the other. Both boundaries are `admin_level=7` because City and Town are mutually exclusive; the City is surrounded by the Town, but its government is independent from that of the Town. -- Kevin Kenny ke9tv (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.) [email]

The Village of Baldwinsville

The Village of Baldwinsville is a village, not a town. You can tell because it's called a village, not a town. RussNelson (talk) 03:04, 4 September 2022 (UTC)

In New York, the legal terms, "City," "Borough," "Town," "Village," and "Hamlet" refer the the form of government, not to the importance of a place. By contrast, the place=* value in OSM refers to the local importance of a place and is one of the aspects that, in rendering, control at what zoom level the label of a place appears and in what type face it's rendered. The form of government is available in `border_type` and in the name of the border relation, which is there for all 1600 or so of New York's municipalities. Further information can also be gleaned from the GNIS, FIPS, SWIS, Wikipedia, and Wikidata links, which are also there for all municipalities.

Not using the place=* node in that way is inconsistent with OSM practice everywhere else, and leads to some pretty awkward rendering decisions, where Brentwood, White Plains, and Irondequoit (all small cities of over 50,000 inhabitants) become place=hamlet because they have not voted a government other than the township, while Geneva (a village of about 3400) is place=city because it has a city charter. Red House (population less than 30) becomes a {{Tag|place|town|| because it's a township, and so on.

In the great many cases where there is a Town that contains a Village or Hamlet (I use capitals to denote that I'm using these words in the legal sense), the place=* node follows the smaller entity. In virtually all of these cases, the township contains other villages or hamlets, and common practice is to use the unvarrnished name to refer to the village and not the township. -- Kevin Kenny ke9tv (on osm, edits, contrib, heatmap, chngset com.) [email]