Even where there is complete agreement that a human settlement is a 'city' there is still usually a question over the population of that city. The question is down to what to include.
A city in many cases is understood to include the contiguous built up area but this will often extend far beyond the original administrative region that bears the name. So we have the "City of London" (the central business district, corresponding to the medieval and Roman city), "Greater London" (The collection of contiguous urban boroughs that area part of the Greater London administrative entity - ironically this does not include the "City of London" but does include the "City of Westminster"), all the built up areas out to the "Metropolitan green belt" (includes bits of every county adjacent to Greater London), or all areas within commuting distance of Central London (with the train services this includes a lot of area and it is getting bigger as faster trains are deployed). When do two cities become one? London and Westminster? Buda and Pest? Minneapolis and St Paul? Dallas and Fort Worth? Kansas MI and Kansas KA? Dusseldorf, Essen and Dortmund? Detroit and Windsor? Joe On Tue, Jun 10, 2014 at 12:50 PM, Andrew Gray <andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk> wrote: > On 10 June 2014 09:20, Markus Krötzsch <mar...@semantic-mediawiki.org> > wrote: > > > The class "city" is used for "relatively large and permanent human > > settlement[s]" [1], which does not say much (because the vagueness of > > "relatively"). Maybe we should even wonder if "city" is a good class to > use > > in Wikidata. Saying that something has been awarded city status in the UK > > (Q1867820) has a clear meaning. Saying that something is a "human > > settlement" is also rather clear. But drawing the line between "village", > > "city" and "town" is quite tricky, and will probably never be done > uniformly > > across the data. > > > > Conclusion: if you are looking for, say, human settlements with more than > > 100k inhabitants, then you should be searching for just that (which I > think > > is basically what you also are saying below :-). > > OSM has had a lot of problems with this as well, I think - labelling > something as a "city" is one of those very slippery terms that > everyone thinks is obvious but never quite agrees on what the obvious > bit is :-) > > I wonder if we should think about how best to make sure people know > this. Perhaps there is a role for the "human-readable" pages to have > disambiguation-type notes on them? "If you are aiming to do a search > based on "instances of 'city'", we recommend you try "instances of > 'human settlement'" instead..." > > -- > - Andrew Gray > andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk > > _______________________________________________ > Wikidata-l mailing list > Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l >
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