On 07/09/2018 09:06, Colin Smale wrote:
On 2018-09-07 09:37, Mark Goodge wrote:
Obviously it's been "town" more than village (and the person who
added it as such was/is pretty local) - but is that still correct?
I'll comment on the latest change about this thread so that
everyone's aware of it.
It has a parish council that has not chosen to style itself as a
town council. So, officially, it's a village.
How does that make it official? There are Town Councils whose name
does not reference an existing place, so what the council calls
itself doesn't make it official...
It does according to the Local Government Act 1972, which is what
defines a town for the purposes of local government.
Once upon a time a Town was a place that had been granted the right
to hold its own market, wasn't it? By that yardstick WM would appear
to be a town. Once again, there is no straight answer to the
question "Is Whickam Market a town or a village?" The only single
correct answer is "it depends" and there are a variety of correct
answers according to the criterion you are using.
There are, indeed, multiple definitions of the difference between a town
and a village, although the idea that all towns have markets and
villages don't isn't really one of them (that's just something of a folk
story). Lots of villages have markets, lots of towns don't. There is
such a thing as a "charter market", which was, originally, only granted
to towns, but if we use that as the basis then we're getting a bit into
historic county territory (as well as having to redefine several quite
large towns as villages!).
So now OSM (or the OSM community or the OSMUK local chapter) has to
get off the fence and pick one. Or pick all of them by adding
multiple tags, like market=yes, population=X etc. That provides the
objective raw data so that data consumers (including renderers) can
make their own decisions.
Multiple tags are certainly helpful, yes. But the particular tag under
discussion here is the 'place' tag.
I do think it's valuable to have a consistent approach to what goes in
the 'place' tag, which means having an agreed approach. Personally, I
think that the Local Government Act distinction between a village and a
town is the most useful, for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's clear
and unambiguous, it's objective rather than subjective. Secondly, it's
easy to find out, it doesn't rely on local knowledge. Also, it tends to
be the distinction that's most relevant to most people's everyday lives.
Other definitions are more problematic. There are two main historical
definitions, one based around town charters and the other around
ecclesiastical parishes, but you need to know the history of a
particular place to be able to apply them. And, in any case, they go
against the OSM principle that we map what is, not what was. Using them
would also create some rather ridiculous situations; Milton Keynes, for
example, is clearly a town by any sensible current definition but would
still be a village by historic definitions.
Equally, using a simple numeric formula ("it's a village if it has fewer
than X inhabitants") is harder than it looks. Quite apart from the
difficulty of determining the actual number of residents, it creates
edge cases where places that are legally and colloquially known as towns
would have to be mapped as villages, and vice versa. Residents of
Lancing, for example, are quite proud to live in the largest village in
England! Who are we to tell them that they don't?
Apart from using the legal definition, therefore, it seems to me that
the only other practical option is to leave it entirely subjective, and
go by what people perceive their town or village to be - to use
whichever of the historic, legal or numeric definitions is most
appropriate for them. But then you have the problem that not everybody
agrees (which I suspect is the issue with Wickham Market, which is why
it's alternated between village and town). And how can the OSM community
be sure that a particular designation really is what the majority of
local residents think, rather than just being the bee in some
individual's bonnet?
Obviously, all of the above is just my opinion, and others may well
disagree. But I'd go by the official designation in any places that I
mapped, unless there's an agreed OSM policy otherwise.
Mark
_______________________________________________
Talk-GB mailing list
Talk-GB@openstreetmap.org
https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
