I am updating the Portuguese wiki and wondering if the terms “city”, “town”, “village” and “hamlet” that appear in various articles about types of highway=*, like unclassified, tertiary, secondary and primary, indirectly imply (or used to imply in the early days) a relationship between highway importance/function and the status (place=*) or “size” (population=*) of the settlements they link.
As a mapper and reader of the English wiki, do you understand these words generically as described by Wikipedia (as 4 gradations of settlement size: city, town, village, hamlet) or as somewhat related to these places’ status? Do you understand the wiki establishes a correspondence between highway importance and settlement importance or size?
For wiki translation, the literal translation of these words result in confusion among variants of Portuguese, so we are considering translating them using more generic expressions, if that’s what the original text means.
The highway=* values were originally modelled on the administrative/legal classification of highways that exists in the UK, as that’s where OSM started. For the use in the UK, it’s clear what Motorway, primary, secondary, tertiary mean. Trunk is slightly more obscure (but corresponds to Primary roads with green signs). Everything else is then either residential (if it’s a non-through-road with houses on it) or unclassified (otherwise).
There’s then been an attempt to describe this classification in generic terms to allow them to be applied consistently to other countries. Interestingly the UK doesn’t really have an official hierarchy of settlement types, apart from “City” (where a place gets a Royal Charter). Town, Village and Hamlet are usually applied by custom/convention depending on the settlement size and features. (Traditionally, towns would have a market, and villages would have a church, but the boundaries are a bit blurred now.)
In any given country, it’s probably best for local mappers to agree on how to map the OSM highway classifications to their own Government’s administrative classification (if one exists) or other highway features (if not). I’d take the wiki pages to be giving general guidance to ensure rough consistency between countries, rather than being overly prescriptive.
So for translating the wiki pages, I’d probably regard the settlement sizes/types as generic, rather than relating to any specific status in any particular country.
As noted, there’s no formal definition. Some cities in the UK have quite small populations. However, for statistical purposes only, the Office for National Statistics does have the following classification: