On 2014-11-06 20:17, Elliott Plack wrote:
Thinking more on this, and using my experience in the foursquare superuser editing community, trying to have a single "state" type entity is really quite hard to scale globally. Political boundaries and administrative levels vary all over the world, and trying to establish a single name for a smaller political unit than the country is really challenging. State? Province? Municipality? There are many names for what a US State is (if you can really compare it out), and so to use addr:state does seem fairly USA focused.
iD supports country-specific address formats. The "State" field only appears for features in the U.S., while Canadian address get a "Province" field. Vietnamese addresses get separate fields for subdistrict, district, city, and province, befitting the customary address format there.
Before the state showed up in iD, I had assumed someone could just easily derive the US state from the postal code.
That would be the case if everyone entered ZIP codes. However, I got this field added [1] because its absence was confusing inexperienced mappers, leading to inconsistent or erroneous data entry. For example, people were setting addr:city to "Youngstown, Ohio" or "Dublin, OH" [2][3], or setting addr:postcode to "OH 45202", "OH", or "Ohio" [4][5][6]. This happened primarily in iD but also to a lesser extent in Potlatch, which also lacks a "State" field in simple mode.
[1] https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/pull/2402 [2] http://osm.org/node/2647332019/history [3] http://osm.org/node/2152729301/history [4] http://osm.org/node/2573293336/history [5] http://osm.org/node/392309592/history [6] http://osm.org/node/357466455/history -- m...@nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
