I'd like to register a +1 in favour of accepting these historic counties.
I *generally* agree with your principle of 'only mapping what is on the
ground', but if we followed that strictly we wouldn't map current
administrative boundaries either. These historic counties do, rightly or
wrongly, form part of some people's sense of identity *today*, and I
think that crosses the bar for inclusion.
--
Cheers,
John
On 10-Aug-18 09:38, Stuart Reynolds wrote:
Hi
I’ve watched this from afar, but thought that I would add my two
pennyworth, as a more casual mapper.
Historic county boundaries have some merit (in a very general sense),
but where do you draw the line? As it happens, I was discussing where,
exactly, Middlesex was with my son only yesterday, and I looked it up on
Wikipedia. Turns out that Middlesex has changed quite significantly over
time. First of all, it existed. Then, some of it got plonked into London
- and it had already lost the City of London and Westminster by then.
Bits of it got hived off to Hertfordshire. Then the rest of it got
incorporated into Greater London. So what would you map, historically?
Do you map every single variation of it, and try and date them all? If
you were going to map historic counties properly, then you must.
But think what this does to the data. Think what this does for the new
mapper (who we are trying to encourage). There is now a mass of
overlapping, conflicting entities to edit. You need to go through every
one, laboriously, working out which ones you need to edit, and which
ones you need to leave alone. It’s a data management nightmare, and the
chances of the wrong thing being edited, or being edited incorrectly,
rises exponentially.
Personally, I have never particularly liked the variety of ways that OSM
attempts to map disused / demolished entities (e.g. bus station
rebuilds, etc) even now. I am firmly of the opinion that we should be
mapping existing, current, objects, and that things that don’t exist on
the ground should be ripped out. If OSM as an organisation wants to take
annual snapshots for posterity, or to set up a separate “historic OSM”
then I am all for it - I won’t be mapping in it, myself, although I
would have an interest in using it. As in my Middlesex example, though,
you would still have data management issues unless you compartmentalise
it by year - but that is a whole new interface or workflow.
So I am very strongly in favour of NOT mapping historic counties, and
only mapping what is on the ground (or verifiably shortly to be there,
as in new builds)
Stuart
On 10 Aug 2018, at 09:24, Sean Blanchflower <smb1...@gmail.com
<mailto:smb1...@gmail.com>> wrote:
I guess you at least acknowledge that not everyone agrees with your
views below though.
A quick factual error though: the traditional/historic counties were
not administrative in the sense that current areas are. The changes of
the Local Government Act 1888 were to create administrative areas for
the first time, and it was the fact that they were called 'counties'
that has caused all the trouble since then. The government
acknowledged that the new areas were distinct from the existing
counties and were not replacing them, and in fact the Ordnance Survey
continued to print them on maps after then.
How do we reach some compromise here? We seem to be at an impasse.
> 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.
On Wed, Aug 8, 2018 at 3:49 PM Sean Blanchflower <smb1...@gmail.com
<mailto:smb1...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Hi all,
I'm smb1001 and have been adding the traditional county boundaries
recently. DaveF kindly let me know of the discussion thread here
so I've joined Talk-GB to add my side of things.
I'm not alone in thinking the traditional county boundaries have a
place on current maps. It's unfortunate here that these counties
are known as 'historic counties' as this implies that they are no
longer extant. The debate as to their current utility or their
immutability is not one I feel is relevant here as there are
arguments on both sides, but the Association of British Counties
summarises it more succinctly than I could in any case (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_of_British_Counties and
the many links therein).
I have no intention of adding any "historic" boundaries beyond the
counties. I settled on the (static) definition of "historic
counties" used by the Ordnance Survey and UK government and was
going to stop there.
I would also have never started my efforts if the results would
have littered invisible lines all over the map. Similarly, if
there were an authoritative trace that could be imported then I'd
agree that that also should be blocked. The reason I've been doing
it is that 99% of the ways required to create the counties are
already in OSM. Pretty much all I've been doing is adding existing
(administrative) boundary ways to these new 'historic' relations
alongside the 'ceremonial' and myriad 'administrative'.
(As an aside, I would also have never started my efforts if I
hadn't been inspired by finding that the same had been done for
other countries.)
I fully agree with Lester's comments on OHM in all this. Without
the presence of the 'current' OSM database in OHM, it's impossible
to get any traction there. For example I can't actually add the
traditional counties to OHM without the current OSM administrative
boundaries (county and parish). Then again, as he said, if the
current OSM set were put there to do so, it ends up duplicating
the site.
I also agree with DaveF that to add every iteration of former
boundaries is not for OSM, but I would argue that the addition of
the traditional counties as defined by this current definition
does not fall into that. After all, certain councils have already
been erecting road signs indicating the presence of these county
boundaries so why would we not reflect that.
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.
smb1001
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