I completely understand why name=*
tags in New York State contain generics and also appreciate that it’s very consistent, thanks to @ke9tv’s tireless efforts. Australia uses a similar naming convention; for example, Melton lies in the City of Melton. I’m also reminded of how people all over the U.S. consider the common name of a county to include “County”, and people in some other states consider a township’s common name to include “Township”. Unfortunately, geocoders are failing to find cities and towns that share a name with counties, sometimes counties on other ends of the state. It isn’t purely the fault of this tagging convention, but more name tags could help mitigate the problems:
Another possibility might be to trim the name of one of the doppelgänger boundaries, moving the full name to official_name=*
, but leaving it in place for the more obscure of the two. This would match Wikipedia’s naming convention. For example, the city would be just “Rye” (with the full name in official_name=*
), while the town would be “Town of Rye” (with the specific in short_name=*
), and the village within would be just “Rye Brook”, because there’s no need for disambiguation. On the other hand, if a town is more well-known than a tiny village, the village might get the specific instead of the town. This won’t look as weird on a rendered map’s boundary edge labels, and it might give users the Rye they’re searching for, but it would be a lot less predictable.