On 08/08/2018 17:05, Stephen Doerr wrote:
On 8 August 2018, at 15:50, Sean Blanchflower <smb1...@gmail.com> wrote:
>I begin to fear I've caused offence in my recent editing, so apologies
if so. I'm just a keen OSM editor trying to add what I see as a valuable
omission in its database.
I for one am glad to have the boundaries of the 'real' counties in OSM,
so thank you for doing this.
I'm sorry, but this is complete and utter bullshit. The "historic"
county boundaries are no more "real" than the current ones. They were,
at the time, the administrative boundaries. They are no longer the
administrative boundaries.
I do appreciate that there are matters where the historic boundaries are
relevant (primarily genealogical research). But that's not really a
mapping issue., And the emotional attachment to the pre-1974 boundaries
is just that - emotion, not based on any objective assessment. And the
fact that, in retrospect, the 1970s changes were over-reaching and did a
lot of harm does not change that.
Describing the historic boundaries as "real" is like insisting that we
map, say, the old Euston station the way it was before it was rebuilt,
because it was a lot nicer then. It may well be the case that it was.
But we map what exists now, not what existed in the past and in
rose-tinted memory. The same with county (and other administrative)
boundaries. We map what is, not what was.
Mark
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