I’ve been recently working with Wisconsin boundaries. I noticed that admin_level=7 and admin_level=8 form a space-filling boundary layer, where 7 is for “towns” (I read this as “townships”) and 8 is for “cities and villages”. Here’s an example of this nesting:
This seems to be the same situation that we have in Maine, where the space-filling boundary layer which contains both townships/gores/plantations and cities/towns are all tagged admin_level=8.
In that discussion, we agreed that all of these should be tagged at =8. I propose that the Wisconsin situation is substantively the same as the Maine situation and that all Wisconsin towns, cities, and villages should be tagged at the same level, 8.
Yes, if Wisconsin’s towns are guaranteed to be exclusive of any municipality, then there’s no need for them to occupy a separate rung in the hierarchy.
(Personally, I wouldn’t call these enclaves “nested”. I’ve been using that term to refer to when a subordinate boundary geometrically lies within another boundary, overlapping it. This way we can succinctly describe admin_level=* as a “nesting level”.)
By “nesting” I really meant something like “carved out of towns”. The towns seems to be in the shape of typical square survey townships while the villages are carved out of and excluded from the squares.
Absolutely. They even call water fountains “bubblers”.
Except for places like Fitchburg, where they took the novel approach of incorporating the entire township. And then Windsor did the same. In both cases, you end up with incorporated “cities” that are mostly farmland. Or, if you look at it another way, a lot of land that’s ripe for development to add to the city’s tax base.
Even still, when the entire township gets incorporated, it also fully subsumes it and the township no longer exists at all – just the incorporated place. So, still a space-filling layer.