In Santa Cruz county (California), each place=* tag has been
carefully compared to local knowledge and a wonderful reference
(book) I have called "Santa Cruz County Place Names: A Geographical
Dictionary" by author Donald Thomas Clark, published by the Santa
Cruz Historical Trust. At over 500 pages, it is a wonderful
reference, and is rather clear on whether something is completely
historical or accurate "currently" (the book is a bit dated, being
published in 1986, but I have the 2nd edition from 2008). The author
was the first librarian at UC Santa Cruz and wrote a similar tome for
Monterey County (also excellent).
Maybe you have or maybe you don't have such a similar (excellent)
resource for your community. I wish everybody did. But you either
DO have or CAN GET local knowledge (everywhere on Earth FOR
everywhere on Earth) that can yield reliable, human sourced data for
OSM to use.
And maybe these data are or maybe these data are not "on the ground
verifiable," in which case I leave it up to you whether they should
or should not be in OSM. If a lonely crossroads gas station with a
friendly owner says "Yep, it's called Orchard Crossroads around
here..." that's good enough for me to put a hamlet into OSM -- I
don't need a sign to tell me, the man who knows it to be true just
did.
Retagging hamlets isn't something that can or should be mechanized by
a bot. It is going to take real effort, meaning local knowledge
crafted by human beings. Hm, this sounds like a good basis upon
which to recruit more volunteers for our project....
SteveA
California
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