I think this makes for a good rule of thumb. I would only draw the line at legal fictions like Indian Hill, Ohio, which styles itself as a “village” but is a city for all intents and purposes. It would be included in any list of cities in the state and omitted from any list of villages, despite having changed the official name to “The City of The Village of Indian Hill” (capitalized exactly thus). By contrast, in California, there’s no practical difference between a city and a town, so adopting “town” in the name is the same as becoming a town in that state.
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Our wiki table reflects this with the usual admonishment about mentioning both “City” and “Town” in a California context, which is “synonymous by law.” See, I think we can (continue to) do this: put categorizations in the table (explaining the esoterica in a footnote, with great precedence at doing so) and for all intents and purposes I currently imagine, all will be well.
The specific name or kind of a border? That’s why (and what and where) we use border_type.
I do my best to be a decent scribe, at least. Please, state how it’s going to be among New Englanders, I guess is what I’m saying; stepping aside. Let the rest of us know how it is and we’ll tighten up the wiki. Somewhere around there works.
I also don’t have super strong feelings on the topic. Nor am I looking to make an exception for NH compared to the rest of the New England states or the USA in general. My intent was to just share some local context.
As long as it’s documented for others in the OSM community and data consumers I can support either approach to keep moving forward. There’s always the option to revisit the topic and refine it later.
Thank you for chiming in as New Hampshire residents, @Mapiate and @AntiCompositeNumber! I suppose the challenge with choosing one border_type value for all New Hampshire unorganized administrative areas, is that that it’s not clear what that one value should be. Do you have a recommendation? Is there an official term the state government uses to include all unorganized areas regardless of whether the name ends in location, purchase, grant, or none of the three?
If we proceed with four values it’s pretty clear which areas should be purchase, grant, and location. However, there are a number of unorganized areas like Dixville, Odell, and Millsfield that have no such qualifying term in the name. Wikipedia seems to consistently call them “townships”, but I haven’t been able to find that term on any New Hampshire government documents so far. I’m wondering if Wikipedia authors are just using Maine’s official term for the same concept. I’ve seen them called “unorganized towns” (same as Vermont), “unincorporated towns”, or just “unincorporated places” . So it seems there is a somewhat unclear decision to make even if we do opt for four values. What is the New Hampshire resident perspective on which term to use for a border_type value?
Purchase, Grant, and Location are not legal designations and are not used consistently for different unincorporated places. For example, Hart’s Location is an incorporated town.
The state is fairly consistent in using “unincorporated places” (which is the term used in state law and the constitution), occasionally using “unorganized areas”. Coös County also uses “unincorporated places” consistently.
Based on User talk:Nyttend/Archive 7 - Wikipedia (discussion interleaved with User talk:Ken Gallager/Archive 3 - Wikipedia ), Wikipedia uses “township” as a descriptive term that is considered to be generally recognizable. National news media reporting on the NH primary/Dixville Notch often explain it as a township, but I expect this to be mostly citogenesis. Local sources tend to refer to places by name only or as unincorporated, though the word “township” is occasionally used. Both local and national sources use township to refer to incorporated towns 
.
tl;dr unincorporated_place if we’re being technical about it, but township is probably good enough.
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A reminder (the odd counter-example of Palmyra Island was offered earlier): being unincorporated is not the same as being unorganized. These are distinct. As best we know them, OSM should denote these as distinctly as we are able, with little or no misunderstanding or fogginess of denotation. If there is a categorization, it will likely fall into a pattern like we see in US_admin_level’s “big table” and should be easily describable in a table row entry (a footnote can clarify). Concepts, ideas and words here, first and welcome, of course. And no rush, let’s get it right, not necessarily fast. These things are nuanced and belong to “the local People” as far as I’m concerned. I love there are any number of New Englanders chiming in here. Sensing consensus ahead!
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Huh. This is the first time I’ve heard this said. I guess “unorganized” is the looser state of being? And unincorporated maybe means there’s a boundary and name but no municipal corporation? Is there a sharper definition?
Unorganized vs unincorporated was discussed upthread:
Maine’s Plantations are an example of an organized but unincorporated entity. As far as I can tell, all the other unorganized administrative areas across VT, NH, and ME are both unorganized and unincorporated.
No, “unorganized” is not the looser state of being. And we can’t let “never heard of it” get in the way of good denotation, as full (-er) understanding of this is required if we are going to agree to tag sanely.
“Organized” sometimes happens (at a federal, like Samoa, or any state level) with an “organized Act.” This establishes “a form of government” (where there was none before). Incorporation is an additional, actually optional, step, although a great many “municipalities” (in the sense of the 50 states, not in the sense of how the federal government classifies such things in the territories) DO also incorporate. This is the USA’s familiar “municipal corporation” (As City of XYZ: it can issue bonds, incurring debt, it can incur civil liability…much like a “corporation” that trades on a stock market or is owned privately).
I am not a lawyer, a political scientist or a terribly deep reader of this particular topic, but I have read some. Try https://www.senate.ga.gov/committees/Documents/CarlVinsonSummaryMunicipalIncorporationProceduresbyState.pdf for a flavor of how different the procedures are for incorporation in each state. And again, “an Organic Act to create the so-and-so government of the (island of…) XYZ…” is how legislation that “initiates politicalness” is often written as a preamble. Organized does not equal incorporated. Unorganized does not equal unincorporated.
Let’s get this right. I try to wear very big-boy pants here, but I also know when I’m out of my league. Ideally, we might want a political scientist from New England who is an OSM mapper familiar with admin_level tagging, but I realize that is a tall order. (Nonetheless, I now ring that bell).
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Sounds like unincorporated_place would be the most appropriate value. I suppose there is a slight risk of mappers in other parts of the country getting the wrong idea and applying this value to unincorporated places elsewhere that have no administrative boundary. That may not matter much though. I wouldn’t want to use township if it isn’t a term actually used for these in New Hampshire, but if it is that seems fine.
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Putting sharp focus on this point, we are talking about unincorporated_place as a value for the border_type key. Zeke’s imagined scenario is a valid “runaway idea” another mapper might get again someday, though I think that what we’re discovering is that is going to happen in ways the syntax will keep appropriate. (It’s working). I haven’t checked, I imagine unincorporated_place is somewhere around rare as a value or key, though we should check.
A can of worms remains open, but we’re documenting this with short blurbs. This can of worms being “what we mean by unincorporated place with that value.” That might always remain open and wriggling, it could remain difficult to well-interpret by many, or we might use some words to seal it up. It’s like US History class (5th, 8th and 11th grade mandatory in my state) around here!
What’s that? Light ahead in this tunnel?! Hurrah!
Edit: I added unincorporated_place as emerging in our border_type wiki.
And nod my head. Neat.