On Wed, 3 Dec 2008, Hugh Barnes wrote: > Hi > > Another locally flavoured tagging question. > > I entered some towns recently. I got stuck wondering whether they were > actually towns, villages, or hamlets. > > I think Australia applies different criteria to determine this designation. > If you follow the guidelines at > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:place, it seems to allow a village > to have up to 10,00 people! Can you see where this is going? That may be a > small place in more populous countries, but I'd certainly call it a town. > > Further, places like, say, Charleville (3000) or Quilpie (maybe half that) > are definitely considered towns. They are hubs for large areas. One town I > wondered about is Samford near Brisbane. It has 3000 or so people according > to Wikipedia, but it's been called a village. (I think it's actually known > as Samford Village.) > > So remoteness seems to count for something. > > Any other criteria you can think of? > > Is it time there were specific place designation guidelines for Oz places? > I suspect we've been quite inconsistent in their absence. > > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Australian_Tagging_Guidelines > > Cheers >
In NSW the designations of many places are courtesy of an import from the NSW Geographical Names Board. Some are simply out of date and some places don't exist any more. We have cities, towns and villages and they are not decided by population, so a decision to annotate according to population would not give designations consistent with the local designation. There are a number of villages in our district with the largest having a population about 1600 people. If it was further away from the main town it might be considered a town in its own right. Anyone got any Australian definitions for city / town / village we can look at? Liz _______________________________________________ Talk-au mailing list Talk-au@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au
