Talk:Paikkakunnat

Oulujärvi

Browsing the mailing list archives I found a recommendation never to exceed 500 nodes / way. For Oulujärvi I tried to keep the parts within 100-150 nodes/way, which leaves room for adding detail if someone gets tracklogs etc. Alv 07:59, 19 December 2007 (UTC)

Please don't change Oulujärvi to natural=water, it's too big to fit guidelines and future restrictions for maximum length of ways and Tiles@Home has problems with it. Ärjänselkä has a tile without any nodes and will be rendered wrong in Osmarender. Also everything in Manamansalo would have to be on layer=1 or higherManamansalo coastline would have to be in a multipolygon relation if we were to use natural=water vs. natural=coastline. It's called "Kainuun meri" for a reason. Alv 11:21, 8 May 2008 (UTC) Alv 10:40, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Cities/Towns

In my opinion we should loosen the definition of city to include more 'kaupunkeja' as cities. My suggestion is to draw the line at 45k inhabitants as that seems to be quite natural (Hyvinkää 45120 inhabitants, Rauma 39691 inhab.). The current recommendation of "Top-10?" is arbitrary, and it seems that the proposer just threw that out there without think about it that much. Restriction currently leaves out quite important cities (i.e. for tourists) and furthermore, this isn't even followed either since Vaasa is on the map even though it's not one of the biggest cities. Think about it, as a result of merging municipalities Kouvola has grown in inhabitants, so should we really remove 2 cities from the map?

The reason given for this restriction to top 10 cities is: "And there is no difference between a city and town, they are the same (kaupunki), but to make the map less crowded we mark the smaller cities as towns.". By no means is the map too crowded even if we'd relax the city restriction a bit, quite the contrary, as it stands the map is quite sparse.

Waaaay back in 2006-07 the map was crowded as the map rendering was much simpler and biggest 10 sounded good. Using some inhabitant # is just as arbitrary imo. --Onion 08:54, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

So should we just go with that 'because it's always been like that' and go ahead and remove Vaasa, Joensuu, Pori, Lappeenranta from cities. And based on some old rendering, even! In my opinion, population still makes more sense in classifying how big a city is with maybe importance (tourists, locally) factored in also, than just top whatever cities based on rendering or well, nothing as it currently stands. Pfr 14:01, 13 August 2009 (UTC)

It is based on population already, just the 10 biggest ones (or should be, it was just a suggestion and people have tagged how they have felt like). --Onion 08:57, 14 August 2009 (UTC)

People have also been taking the top-10 suggestion as gospel. Case in point, Rovaniemi: "note = This should NOT be tagged city. See http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/WikiProject_Finland/Places". That's why I brought this up, to get a feel whether people thought clarification/update was in order.

Nothing is set in stone, so should we change this ? 50k or Top-20 would be pretty much the same (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Finnish_municipalities_by_population). Also now with the mergers of municipalities we should check how the city sizes change. --Onion 09:17, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

I would vote for a change. 50k or top 20 seems like a good restriction and I agree with the statement about importance of tourists and so on, so a not so easy choice has to be made. However, I also noticed that Mikkeli is marked as city because of the largest town within that region. We'll reach the limit fast if we're adding capital of all regions. --Floppe 12:38, 16 August 2012 (BST)

For comparison, Sweden seems to make the distinction between city and town at 50k inhabitants, Norway draws the line at 100k (which is clearly too high for them, as they've still included Tromsa in that). Pfr 11:51, 11 August 2009 (UTC)

Sources

(Moved from main page) I (onion) plan to import GNS data with a large amount of places as soon as my import script is ready. The data needs a lot of cleanup before it's ready for import but I'll will add wikipedia links, urls to municipalities homepages and maybe guide links to wikitravel.

Problems with the GNS data:

• Only a small amount of suburbs are marked as such
• No way to separate suburbs from villages/hamlets
• Latest municipality mergers are missing

GNS places seem to be quite inaccurate. I have moved some towns away from middle of a lake or nowhere and placed them to some reasonable location with Landsat imagery. However, it is not the best option to import some data to OSM and edit it there. In the next import from the original source the error just comes back. Better option would be to inform those who maintain the original data so they could correct those before import. I fear this can't be done with GNS data but with Geonames it might be possible. JRA 15.9. 2007