On the current map, NYC is titled “New York,” while every other locality within New York State bears one of the legally-prescribed prefixes (e.g. “City of,” “Town of,” “Village of,” etc.). Formerly, NYC was titled as such; however, approximately five months ago, the name was changed to “New York,” and, legally, and on all public documentation, the City is referred to as the “City of New York.”
The names with legally-prescribed prefixes are a good fit for official_name=*, thus freeing up name=* for the more commonly used name without the prefix. I see New York City is already tagged this way: official_name=City of New York, name=New York (plus alt_name=New York City for good measure)
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Normally, a legal title would definitely be more appropriate for official_name=* than name=*. However, several years ago, a mapper changed each boundary in New York to have the legal title as name=*. The idea was to clarify the very common case of a town and a village inside it that share the same name. Sometimes there’s even a village adjacent to the town that shares the same name. They only renamed the boundaries but didn’t go as far as to rename the place points, since those represent populated places rather than corporate entities. This solution is imperfect, as we discovered a couple years ago when this issue last came up:
As a non-local, I’d also prefer to normalize the boundary names back to the short form, if not for the town boundaries then at least for the cities and villages. We never use the short form for a county anywhere in the country, and some states never use the short form for a township either (equivalent to a New York town). This would improve geocoding considerably and improve consistency with place=city/town/village points. If it makes the boundaries look more confusing on the map, the proper fix would be for renderers to more clearly distinguish between admin_level=7 and admin_level=8 in labels and dash patterns.
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