Talk:Tag:place=village

Population range of villages

The page currently suggests that place=village usually have population of 1000 to 10000 inhabitants, but this appears to be incorrect.

The page place=hamlet suggests using that smaller settlement tag for places with less than 100 or 200 inhabitants, which would leave a gap.

Also, the median place=town (next larger settlemtn) worldwide is approximately population=9000, and some countries (eg Canada, Greece) have medians below 4000 for place=town - villages are defined as smaller than this.

In North and South Dakota, a large majority of place=village have population <1000; and population <200 is more common as >1000 for village in those States. In Ireland most villages lack a population tag, but there are slightly more with <1000 population than >1000 population, among the few tagged.

In Switzerland, where over 2500 villges have population tags, there are 1276 villages with <1000 population and 1198 with >1000 population. Only 175 Swiss villages have population>5000, but 267 have poplulation<200. Median population of those tagged is about 950.

In Belgium, median is about 3500, but 14% are under 1000. Only 26 over 10k, 2 under 200. In Portugal, the median is 700, most are between 200 and 5000 population. In Greece, median is about 450, range 100 to 3000. In Denmark the median is 700, range 201 to 6900 (apparently they are quite precise about this there: towns in Denmark also have an exact range of 7001 to 49999 population).

The median overall for the example countries downloaded was population ~700 - but remember, this is based on the minority of place=village which actually have a population tag. I suspect that those without a population tag are smaller, on average.

This review suggest that the population range should be extend to minimum 100 - maximum 10,000, but we should clarify that the median is around 400 to 4000 depending on country: smaller places are usually hamlets and larger places are towns, but the cut-off depends on the country. --Jeisenbe (talk) 16:08, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

I've removed any mention of the population for now. This matches the state of place=town and place=city, which do not currently state a usual population range. However, I would prefer to add something about the usual population range to give mappers some idea.

Would it be reasonable to add somthing like this?:

"The median population of villages in the database varies widely between different countries, from under 400 to over 3000. Places with population of from 100 to 10,000 are sometimes tagged as place=village. Adding a population=* tag is helpful, especially when a settlement is near the upper or lower ends of this range."

--Jeisenbe (talk) 03:32, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

I generated a formal proposal for the classification criteria here: Proposed_features/Populated_settlements_classification --Iagocasabiell (talk) 01:54, 7 September 2019 (UTC)