How should micronations be mapped on OSM

General talk
21

They both are - from their different points of view. From an administrative perspective Réunion is an external department of France, but a statistician may choose to present data differently if lumping everything together may confuse. As an example this wikipedia page separates out “Metropolitan France” from “Overseas Departments/Regions” so that the “answer to the question that most people were probably asking” is not complicated by “the technically correct answer to the question that most people were not asking”.

I still don’t see what this has to do with Micronations. The PDF (that I keep referring back to so often that it’s turning up in my browser suggestions now!) covers “how things can be culturally sensitive” and how de jure definitions may vary from de facto ones.

Other definitions that have been suggested (not entirely seriously, allegedly by Frank Zappa) don’t really work - a map of “countries based on having at least one beer” would have significant omissions and yet would include Sealand..

22

For me it’s always been are they acting as a country and are other countries treating them as one?

For the former, are they

  • doing normal governance tasks,
  • collecting taxes,
  • seeking to participate in international organizations where countries are members[1],
  • setting their own foreign policy,
  • doing other normal activities countries do.

For the latter, do countries

  • treat them as a country, even if they don’t call it that,
  • accept passports from there,
  • accept delegations from that country, or
  • grant them official recognition.

Micronations fail most or all of these. I thought about this when I was on the DWG, mainly in the context of breakaway regions supported by Russia, which is out of scope of this topic.

[1]: Both the common international organizations like ISO, WHO, UN, ITU, etc but also less common ones. If an association has country-level membership can that entity get a membership?

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