Hello,
I usually mark named places as an area instead of a node because, besides being a richer information per se, an area gives better results e.g. when you search for a street in nominatim.
For instance, in small/old cities there are lots of named neighbourhoods, and assigning a street to the nearby neighbourhood instead of the correct one might be confusing, because even if the two places are close, they might have a different nature (e.g. an industrial zone vs a residential zone) or a different access way.
As another example, we have adjacent villages with one road with a single name crossing both villages, but with a street numeration which “restarts” when the road crosses the boundary between one village and the other; therefore we can have two different street addresses with the same street name, and the same street number, and which are only a few kilometers apart, but they differ only in the “village” specification.
The only problem I see with marking places as an area, is that it looks like the default mapnik render at openstreetmap.org won’t draw a label for places marked as an area (or perhaps it doesn’t when the area contains other features which apparently get a “precedence” over the label - I could be wrong about this).
Besides the fact that not displaying the information is a pity, it also happens that contributors, not seeing a label, don’t realise that a place has already been tagged as an area, and map it again as a node, which goes against the principle that a single feature shouldn’t be mapped more than once. Also, marking places as a node has the advantage that it allows one to mark the “center” of a place, which often is determined by historical / demographic reasons more than by geometric calculations.
Is there an accepted solution to this? I see there is a proposed “label” relationship but the wiki says that it isn’t finalised yet, and I think that it looks like “tagging for the renderer”. And if there is no current solution, should I prefer to keep marking places as an area, which is more correct but a bit more difficult to maintain, or as a node, which contains less information but is simpler?