Admin_levels for Malaysia

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dadministrative#10_admin_level_values_for_specific_countries

please have a look at this wiki.

On the OSM database however, Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur has no admin_level at all
the city of Kuala Lumpur has admin_level=2
the city of Kota Kinabalu has admin_level=4

Tanjung I don’t find in the wiki admin_levels

And something like “Penampang” there’s the Pekan Penampang which is the capital city of the Daerah Penampang which is the district
but there’s also the west coast “Division”

Now “dearah” is admin_level 6 according to this wiki

So the city/capital city of the district should be 7+ (lower ranking than district)

admin_level = 2 is always the country…

So somehow - I’m completely puzzled by this chaos…

Could anyone of the Malaysian community please update the admin_level wiki entries for Malaysia so I can tag everything properly?

My proposal/understanding to do this correct:

admin_level=1 (ASEAN) for example
admin_level=2 (Malaysia as country)
admin_level=3 (open, not used yet)
admin_level=4 negeri (states)
admin_level=5 bahagian (divisions) Sabah & Sarawak only
admin_level=6 daerah (districts)
admin_level=7 daerah kecil (subdistricts)

Do districts actually have subdistricts? At least in KK I’m not aware of the district having subdistricts? If no - because it’s just a name difference between states - then this could be merged into 1 admin level.

admin_level=8 mukim (townships) huh? A mukim can be a dearah, or subdivision or dearah kecil according to wiki, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukim

So 8 doesn’t make any sense…if the word has many meanins from state to state - and already covered by districts, dearah, dearah kecil

As this wiki explains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divisions_of_Malaysia divisions are basically the same (primary) as subdivisions…
So we can skip mukim and simply use Bahagian for divisions and subdivisions aka level 5…
and then dearah for 6 and dearah kecil for 7

Then we can use level 8 for the next closest thing below level 5-7 which would be municipalities, cities, towns: Bandaraya, Pekan, etc…

Then we have lvl 9 and 10 left for the areas within cities kampung, taman, etc

I am not aware of any flaws or mistakes I’m addressing here as I’m not a local - but I do want to map here KK and surroundings properly - so I’m just posting this here to start the conversation to get this done properly and I hope some of the local native Malay kick in here to sort this out and have at the https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary%3Dadministrative#10_admin_level_values_for_specific_countries the entries and information for Malaysia properly done.

I can edit that page too - if here in the forums we can come to a conclusion how to do this properly for Malaysia.

So folks- let’s get on with the discussion please

Hi (I’m Mohd by the way - if you happen to recognise this name)! In short - sometimes things went a bit complicated. My home state, Kedah for example, could be categorised this way:

admin_level=4 ⁓ negeri (state of Kedah)
admin_level=5 ⁓ (no suitable classification for use in Kedah)
admin_level=6 ⁓ daerah (districts)
admin_level=7 ⁓ (no suitable classification for use in Kedah)
admin_level=8 ⁓ mukim (subdistricts)
admin_level=9 ⁓ (no suitable classification for use in Kedah)

There’s a daerah kecil (NOT a subdistrict, more like a minor district) in Kedah - Pokok Sena. I would rather treat it as a full-fledged one (oversimplification, maybe?). It’s now distinct, from a chunk of land used to be gazetted under the Kota Setar district.

Some would argue to map admin_level=10 showing boundary of local councils (alternatively known as municipalities), but, hey, I’m open to hearing discourse about it. There’s hardly any open data available for that yet but why not…

Across the South China Sea, definitely things are not the same.

hopefully exclude local councils from admin_level. They’re more of a ‘care taker’ instead of the official adminstrative hierachy level/authority. A polygon, but not sure what to tag that with.

Imagine this being resolved by Nominatim.

1, Jalan Cempaka 10, Taman Cempaka, Ampang, MPAJ, Hulu Langat, Selangor. Yiiisshhh! :laughing:

I think we already have a long long discussion before that on forum. but for me what i suggest is already written in OSM wiki first, but not strictly implement. I am more active on Telegram group and I am welcome to have a detail discussion at there since I maybe only visit the forum twice a week and the probability of many Malaysian mapperswill miss out this important message.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Malaysia/Other_tagging_aspects

BTW, weare nit tagging for the renderer, so I think the Nominatim should be invented a special address format for Malaysia, I think the discussion already bring out long long time a go but as of now no change from Nominatim. Also district is more to land parcel lot usage. You will only know your mukim or pekan or district in highly urbanization area during Covid-19 daily cases, random Kebenaran Merancang / construction board along the road and your land tenure. For Selangor it is indeed to revamp the district boundary but maybe planning department and constitutional department do not want to do so and the influence for local government is bigger than district in some regions. Ahhh, I do hope one day I can the state land department to sort up this problem and resolve it. Very poor administration division in Malaysia…

For KK situation, what I suggest is KK is the Sabah capital, admin level for 3 (wilayah), Penampang is a district (6) Pekan Penampang or Donggongan is the seat of district (6). KK dont have a official sub districts in the department of statistic data so only till district 7 daerah kecil for sabah. 10 can be kampung/taman

Nominatim addressing issues is only one aspect of the problem.

Majlis bandaran can span across multiple district/mukims, causing error/validation checks on JOSM etc to go nuts. And only a few people are willing to clean up errors flagged by those validation checks.