It’s great to see forward momentum here! Such things often (heh, case in point) take years to unravel…so far, so good. Thanks to all who positively contribute to OSM, Onward!
It seems to me that no one has any standards that they will ever decide or agree upon. People have inconsistently allowed settlements in Maine with fewer than 100 people be classified as towns, while allowing settlements with populations numbering a few thousand be classified as cities. Meanwhile, States like Mass, Conn, and Rhode Island remain equally inflated, while Vermont and New Hampshire are allowed to remain sparse. In the past, other mappers have come up with and implemented the 100,000+ (city), 10,000+ (town), 1,000+ (village) 1,000- (hamlet) standard. I do not care for this standard, but it is better than the lack there of that has been allowed, and simply removing any efforts to standardize settlement classification without coming up with your own solution is lazy and ineffective. Now what’s worse, is some of you have taken it upon yourselves to once again over inflate Maine place names. Rockland has been classified as a city, despite having a population of less than 7,000. Should towns with populations much larger, such as Berwick, or Windham, be called cities then? Other “cities” such as Bath, Brewer, and Belfast, are labeled as “towns” (rightfully so, due to their small size) and yet they both have similar populations to Rockland. What makes Rockland so special that it deserves city status? The same can be said for Presque Isle, which is, like Rockland, a city in official name only. It’s population is well under 10,000 people, and that’s only due to the massive land area it takes up. Presque Isle is one of the largest municipalities in the state by land area. If it had the same land area as Portland, its population would likely be cut in half. Brunswick, which has, and always will be, a town, has also been repeatedly classified as a city without any discussion. Brunswick is officially a town, and not viewed as a city by anyone who lives in Brunswick, or anyone who lives in Maine. The only true cities in Maine are arguably Portland, Lewiston, and Bangor. Augusta is notable enough to be classified as a city given that it is the state’s capital, despite its meager population, which is well under 20,000. Biddeford is a suburb of Portand, similar to Westbrook and South Portland, and Auburn to Lewiston, all of which have populations greater than Biddeford, but none are classified as cities given they function suburbs of actual, larger cities. It seems to me that no one going to actively come up with a solution, and instead undermine any efforts to implement one.
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The way to a solution is discussion and collaboration, proposals, and experimentation, not unilateral editing. Hence your invitation to the forum here.
We came to a consensus similarly on highway classification, which was quite tricky. This topic is no less challenging.
Also, I would invite you to insert some line breaks every now and then for readability.
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And yet no one in this forum has offered any proposals. If you need line breaks to read, that’s your problem, not mine. If you have no proposals to offer, why even respond? You only have a response for my lack of line breaks, but not to a single thing that I have discussed?
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The main discussion is linked in the original post, where you can find several possible ways forward. I would however aim for a less combative approach if you expect to gain any traction in these discussions.
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Hello @edops. Thank you for joining the discusssion. I appreciate your enthusiasm for improving place classification and I hope you will choose to participate in a productive way. Through community discussion and consensus building I’m sure we can make durable changes to the New England hierarchy of place classification. This is not something that can be implemented by a single mapper. Continued attempts to go it alone will only lead to more churn.
In addition to the previously linked discussion on New England place name inflation, there have also been several recent dicussions focused on other areas of the country. Lots of good ideas in these threads.
- Place classification - town vs suburb, remote rural areas, how does a CDP relate to place
- Recent Alaska place= reclassification
While no one has formally proposed a set of guidelines yet, we seem to be coalescing around using the Census Bureau’s Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas as a starting point. Simple population thresholds for each class of place will not work. A 10,000 person settlement can be quite significant within a sparsely populated rural region, while a 50,000 person settlement can be fairly insignificant within in a densely populated metropolitan region. Place classification reflects the relative significance of a settlement and thus some significant places with low populations will be correctly classified above some insignificant places with higher populations. This is not easy to get right!
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@edops please take note of the message in your first warning:
The discussion has to happen in a suitable community medium BEFORE you make the edit.
edops blocked by woodpeck | OpenStreetMap
Five new changes:
- Changeset: 150399846 | OpenStreetMap
- Changeset: 150403110 | OpenStreetMap
- Changeset: 150403267 | OpenStreetMap
- Changeset: 150403852 | OpenStreetMap
- Changeset: 150403957 | OpenStreetMap
Please hold off on these updates until consensus has been reached.
Proven right yet again. There are no efforts by anyone to come up with a “consensus” all talk and no proposals. You’d rather spend your time halting progress than making any yourself. By what “consensus” was it decided that Brunswick should be reclassified as a city, despite it not being recognized as a city in any shape or form? I see no discussion about it here. And yet it’s only when I revert a town like Brunswick back to its original, and correct status, that edits are undone. It seems that other people needs a consensus and you don’t? How about instead of reverting those changes, you come up with a single, good reason why Brunswick, Maine should be classified as a city. I expect you won’t. I expect you revert changes that you don’t even pay attention to or understand in the slightest.
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I also find it amusing that you are from Maryland, yet you are trying to dictate the status of small towns in Maine that you clearly have no understanding about. Do some of your own research before mindlessly changing the status of small towns in Maine into cities.
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The standard that I must wait for a consensus that will never come to make changes that I have already provided evidence for being correct, does nothing but turn away editors who desire to make the map more accurate, while at the same time serving to decrease the quality and accuracy of the map itself. I think you’re all upset that someone came in and fixed all of the mistakes that you let sit stagnantly for who knows how long, and instead of accepting that the work you refused to do yourself was done for you, you instead undermine it by keeping the bulk of my work left alone, and making your own, incorrect changes and reclassifications to attach your own name to it.
Why don’t you go ahead, and undo all of my changes, and allow Maine to be flooded with hundreds of town labels, as it was before I fixed it. I’m starting to consider doing it myself, and leaving this pathetic excuse of a “community” behind to never fix it, because they never will.
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This is a misunderstanding. You must participate in building the consensus, not wait for it to arrive. Unlike many other things in OpenStreetMap, place classification is not a purely objective fact for which evidence of correctness can simply be provided.
As I’ve stated before, I am holding out hope that you can become a productive member of the OSM community. The general direction of your changes are good even if I don’t agree with some of the choices you’ve made. The problem is that you have marched across New England like a bulldozer upsetting the status quo. Other mappers do not take kindly to this kind of lone wolf behavior and it is a sure way to ensure your changes won’t stick around. I really do hope you’ll have a change of heart, but that seems less and less likely as it seems you prefer to continue insulting us.
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The OpenStreetMap community certainly does love endless discussions 
. Criticism well taken. However this is simply the reality of a volunteer driven, self organizing, open data project. Discussion must be held to establish consensus. I understand this is frustrating. I’ve been frustrated by it myself, but unless you plan to somehow get yourself appointed dictator of OSM, there is no other way. Discussion is effort and it has been under way for a number of months. See the latest topic for proposals: Framework for aligning New England place nodes to census categories
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I am here as moderator and community member, not dictating the status of any towns. The community here, especially other locals in the New England area, can come up with a solution that works.
Ideally the meaning of city, town, etc. would be uniform across all of OSM so data users know what they are getting when using the data.
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Heyyyyyy now! 
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Over the last ten, twelve, fourteen years or so, many OSM contributors in the USA have hammered out methods and guidelines we choose to assign values of both admin_level=* (2, 4, 6, 8 as nation, state, county, city/town is well-established, but the devil is in the details and there really, REALLY is more to it than that) and place= (city, town, village, hamlet). Especially in New England, this is difficult, partly for historical reasons, partly for linguistic, political and “that’s how people call things around here” reasons. (Which are often very hard-fought and colloquial, but may or may not have much basis / grounding in legal reality). It may be that “lots of people think that ought to be a town” (or village or hamlet…) but if one person can point to a statute or city charter or state constitutional article that states black-letter law, that can be (and has been) accepted as definitive in a particular case. We could use more of those, although they are hard to come by and don’t always break ties; ambiguity often seems to remain. Still, we get closer and closer, and that is the ideal, so let’s keep “getting closer” in that vein.
I, we here don’t expect everybody who contributes to the betterment of this to have absorbed the entire history of it, as watching sausage get made isn’t ever as tasty as the final product. But we’re well along the way of at least “roughing out” what we mean by [city, town, village, hamlet]. Yet we still have a ways to go, especially in New England, where there are both quirkinesses and idiosyncrasies in about three states, where the other 47 look at the results with “huh?” (Yet, all fifty states must be seen as unique, even as we share many similarities, too)…
As with any “argument” in OSM discussion channels (not as in a rancorous cat-fight of opinions, but of a civil dialog with points, counterpoints, evidence and good ideas and suggestions bolstered by reason), poo-pooing the process of consensus while indicating hostility and impatience with the process will doom your efforts faster than anything. Please offer reasons, evidence, law, history, fact-based data and you will have many listening ears here, and that is the beginning of consensus. Yes, it can be difficult to achieve, and for something like this will have “lumpiness,” regional differences that are simply inevitable. But, that’s the way these things have, do and will get solved in OSM.
Look for commonalities, “show your work,” and don’t assume that “what you know must be correct because I live here and therefore must know best.” Maybe. But, maybe not. OSM is most certainly a learning experience for absolutely everybody. Know-it-alls are not really welcome. Experts, who can support their views, hey, great. Know-it alls? Sorry, no.
This is hard, yes. But it is doable, too. Let’s give ourselves the time and space to tease it all apart. We’re going to take those anyway, so let’s just say we are and get that understood by any and all who want to contribute.
Uh-oh, double-post by me.
While it isn’t done, but it is evidence of much improvement over our decades, what if we took a state-by-state approach for [city, town, village, hamlet]? You’d be correct to accuse me of “loving a big table of the fifty states with row-by-row results…” but this approach HAS worked to achieve SOME consensus w.r.t. highway classifications, admin_level, public_lands classifications and more. I’m just spitballing here, but it could both work and be an explanation for sharp differences that might be seen (in renderers at particular zoom levels) across state boundaries.
Each state could be population-based (with numbers / thresholds different from here vs. there), “must have a grocery, post office and hardware store to be called a village,” some combination, or whatever.
Edit: This does toss out the window Elliott’s “ideal” that a town is a town is a town (everywhere), but that does seem like an almost unobtainable ideal. Still, I keep an open mind.
In New England, the city tag should be limited to Micropolitan and Metropolitan areas. This includes large towns like Brunswick, and small cities like Waterville and Sanford. It does not, however, include towns that are called cities, such as Rockland or Presque Isle.
This is a fair compromise for the two sides, and has a third party definition to pull from.
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I think the issue there are places like South Burlington, which I think folks feel should NOT be a place=city.
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This is not a problem. Because Burlington is the more prominent city, it gets the label. The same way that, currently, South Portland doesn’t get the label because Portland is more prominent, and Auburn doesn’t get the label because Lewiston is more prominent.
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