Hi Chris, Interesting topic - sadly the wiki just acknowledges the lack of an answer. My take is that the distinction between village/town/city really only matters for the purpose of rendering anyway - any more sophisticated use of the data is going to use population figures to make its own decision about how to classify towns. So I think it's ok to be a bit loose and subjective with our definitions.
Hard for me to comment on the QLD ones. The Victorian ones are Warrnambool, Sale and Mildura. W and M definitely sense as cities than towns. They're "major regional centres", and much more significant than towns nearby. Sale is more lineball (although Wikipedia counts it) - nearby Bairnsdale should be a city though. You see the effect it has on Mapnik here: http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=-36.74&lon=145.31&zoom=8&layers=M It's definitely wrong having Sale show up at that zoom but not Bairnsdale. But the more I look at the Wikipedia list (counting 18 cities outside Melbourne), the more I think it would make sense to mark all of those as city. None of them seem out of place subjectively to me. I'm not clear on where the list on Wikipedia was derived from though. If you compare the list by population against the ones designated "city", some omissions are Echuca, Warragul, Bacchus Marsh, Ocean Grove-Barwon Heads. Not a big deal though. Steve On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 9:17 AM, Chris Barham <cbar...@pobox.com> wrote: > Hi, > some Australian places have changed from cities to towns on; > changeset was: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/14217241 > > I've emailed to the editor to ask the source for the change as I believe > some are now incorrect. > > I really do think Gympie, Maryborough, Warwick and Charters Towers are > cities, and should have remained tagged as such. Are there others, in > other states, within this changeset that should have stayed as is? > > Wikipedia is not the best reference material I know, but they have the Qld > ones I mentioned as cities: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Australia > > Additionally, I think some of the others should to be tagged cities, even > if not officially, under the Aus tagging guidelines at: > > http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Australian_Tagging_Guidelines#City.2C_Town_or_Village.3F > > So looking at the tagging guidelines, haven't we agreed to tag by > population size or significance in remote areas? > Here is a populated list of places by population for Qld that could be > useful any discussion: > http://www.bonzle.com/c/a?a=f&sc=lg&st=3&cmd=sp > > Cheers, > chas > > > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-au mailing list > Talk-au@openstreetmap.org > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-au > >
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