Proposed automated edit to restore tags to place nodes in Alabama

Communities United States
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The administrative boundaries in Alabama were recently updated from 2006 TIGER data to 2023 TIGER data. In the process, each boundary was assigned a place node with the label role if it did not have one. During the updates the wikidata, wikipedia, population, population:date, source:population, and name:* tags that were unintentionally removed from the place nodes.

These tags are useful to have on the place nodes so that data consumers can access this information without having to parse the boundary relations.

This automated edit proposes to restore the wikidata, wikipedia, population, population:date, source:population, and name:* tags where they are missing from the place nodes in Alabama.

These tags will be copied from the parent boundary relation to the place node that has the label role in the parent relation – but only if the name tags match between the boundary relation and the place node. No existing tags will be replaced – tags will only be copied from the boundary relation to the place node if they do not exist on the place node.

The proposed automated edit at Automated edits/Kai Johnson - Alabama Place Tags - OpenStreetMap Wiki.

This automated edit was originally discussed with @ezekielf and @Minh_Nguyen in the OSM US Slack and this post will be mentioned in the local-alabama channel there.

Are there any comments or concerns about this proposed automated edit?

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Not only that, but the boundary and its label member have an equal claim to being accurate representations of the place. So they should share the same wikidata=* tag as long as the Wikidata item conflates the human settlement with the incorporated place (as most still do). population=* is technically more correct on the boundary, which unambiguously refers to the incorporated territory whose population was enumerated, but data consumers virtually always use population=* to determine how they portray the place point rather than the boundary.

Even though some data consumers such as Overpass queries can cope with the boundary relations, with some effort, it’s simply surprising that Alabama’s places are tagged completely differently than in the rest of the country for no readily apparent reason.

The proposed edits sound reasonable to me. Thanks for running with this!

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Since all the responses have been positive, I went ahead with the update: Changeset: 151779412 | OpenStreetMap

If anyone sees any issues with the changes, let me know and I’ll follow up!

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