On May 11, 2020, at8:28:48 PM PDT, Martin Machyna <mach...@gmail.com> wrote: > I am just going to paste here what I wrote on Slack and I as well consider > removal of counties from admin_level=6 as vandalism.
It is not vandalism, it is an established, consensus-driven, years-old tagging principle, fully documented of how, when and why it is this way. > Pasted text: > > My argument would be to not take boundary=administrative in a strict sense of > government, but use it to tag all the areas that are part of the > administration system. Given the cozy relationship of what OSM means by "administrative" compared to "government," this seems contradictory, confusing, or both. I do not understand how stating this is helpful or clarifying to the discussion. I see no functional difference between "administration system" and "government." > And I think that we should keep in mind a user of OSM data, who does not seek > to understand all the little nuances of US government system (there are more > specialized projects for that like Wikipedia), but rather looks for a simple > and consistent way how to subset or graphically represent GIS data. In that > sense I would find very confusing to download OSM data and find out that all > states have counties at admin_level=6 , except for CT I have to look for some > other obscure tag to recreate the same spacial devisions. Yet, the reality of Connecticut is that it HAS these nuances. (Rhode Island is another state which has even more strict "county-less" lack of political structure, so it is "not only Connecticut"). OSM strives to tag accurately "what is" in the real world, and actually through a joint effort between Martin and myself (and others, it seems), accurate tagging IS what we now have! OSM has plastic tagging and we use it where it is appropriate (like here). Briefly, as Connecticut (and Rhode Island) hasn't political counties (the counties it does have are vestigial and geographic only), Connecticut's limited-government, subordinate-to-state, superordinate-to-town "RCOGs" (Regional Councils of Governments) are tagged boundary=COG, not boundary=administrative. And, counties (in both these states) are tagged boundary=region, border_type=county. (The former is used over 500 times in OSM, that isn't an "obscure tag"). It really is as simple as that, though it wasn't simple during 2012 through 2017 while OSM hashed this out in the relevant Talk page. But since we have and did (meanwhile, Connecticut reduced its COGs from 15 to 9 and standardized their naming as RCOGs), we documented that not only is boundary=COG a perfectly sensible tag, and this precludes admin_level (correctly, as it binds to boundary=administrative). > In the end, no one cares that counties in CT seized to exist, because even > state of CT itself is still actively using them for statistical and other > purposes (as here). And I would think the same logic of thinking would expand > to COGs or other administrative regions. No, people do care. And, statistical boundaries aren't usually mapped (especially as boundary=administrative) in OSM, unless they are mapped as boundary=census, which took a lot of discussion leading to consensus that these aren't mapped as boundary=administrative, either. We carve out exceptions for these (statistical boundaries) where / as we decide to carve out an exception for them, sometimes we tag them boundary=census (where they are unarguably statistical), and we specifically indicate we should or do tag others boundary=COG, MPO, SPD, LAFCO, water district, etc. > >> Also, I don't believe in "states with no counties". Without meaning to insult you, it matters little what you believe, the fact is, there are two states without counties (except as geographic areas). So, we tag in a way that indicates this distinction. We should, we do. > I do believe in > >> "county government dissolved". Still, the counties as boundaries > >> continue to exist, and remain important, We agree, which is why they are tagged boundary=region, border_type=county. No reason to make a fuss; counties so tagged are correctly tagged. > and shoudl still be > >> admin_level=6. We disagree, and by wide consensus, established almost three summers ago. Want to overturn established consensus? We can do that, but it must be "we," and it must be well-argued, more scholarly than it has been and widely agreed-to. We are not there yet; we haven't effectively yet begun. We also try the patience of many as we do so (already established to be wearing thin here). > Many times interacting with the government you are > >> required to list your county. And, almost everyone believes in county > >> boundaries and the notion of knowing which county you are in, even if > >> they don't collect taxes and have employees. Whether and how OSM maps a county isn't determined by what you or a number of people believe. It is determined by political realities and established tagging standards, sometimes requiring carefully-crafted consensus, which here we have largely achieved. If you want to change this, make an argument as described in the Discussion page of the relevant wiki. This includes addressing Home Rule and Dillon's Rule, not repeatedly exhorting "your beliefs." > We in the Massachusetts local community want to have admin_level 6 > relations for these boundaries, and I personally consider deleting them > to be vandalism. Then let's hear from them and their rather precisely-described to-become arguments, rather than you and your beliefs (nor me and my repetitions of these). Saying that a dozen of you believe 2 + 2 = 5 (especially as 11 other voices aren't present) doesn't make it so. Cogent, scholarly, well-presented arguments that address the salient political and legal topics described (in the wiki page, where this more properly belongs, though I'm glad it's getting a hopefully final gasp of exposure here) might be able to describe why 2 + 2 might look like 5, in a certain way, in Connecticut, because of x, y and z. But nobody is hearing that and nobody but user:Mashin is saying so. (At least in wiki and talk-us. Slack? That's proprietary. I avoid secret-sauce walkie-talkies in an open data project, but that's me. I do hear that people use it to communicate, I wouldn't know what's on it). SteveA _______________________________________________ Talk-us mailing list Talk-us@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
