Wiki contradicts map editor for boundary=political?

General talk
1

I’m trying to make a new area that shows a local council electoral ward in the UK.

Tag:boundary=political - OpenStreetMap Wiki says that boundary=political is used on ways and relations (are ways the same as lines?).

So my understanding is that I should make a relation with values boundary=political and political_division=ward. Not all the edges are there, so I’ll first have to add some extra lines with the same tags. I tried making some lines and there was no political boundary option. When I added a line and the tag it gave me a warning message saying ‘Area should be a closed area based on the tag “boundary=political”’.

What’s really confusing me is that Tag:boundary=administrative - OpenStreetMap Wiki says boundary=administrative is also for ways and relations. But you can make a line that’s an administrative boundary without error. If they are both for ways and relations, shouldn’t they both have the same behaviour?

Does anyone know what I should do?

2

Ignore the error from the editor.

Doing it the way the wiki suggests is perfectly fine, and regularly used.
There is an open issue about this

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3

Once upon a time boundary relations were not very well supported in OSM editors and other tools, and for that reason you were supposed to duplicate the boundary tag (and for administrative boundaries the admin_level and name tags) on the constituent ways.

This has been total nonsense for many many years and it is ridiculous that it is still being suggested in the wiki. On top of that it has lead to simple polygons aka closed ways not really being used for cases in which boundaries could be modelled with a single area with less than 2’000 vertices.

So it is a silly mess that doesn’t make any sense, don’t fret about it.

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4

Thanks to both of you.

I was just planning on adding boundary=political to new lines, otherwise they go completely unlabelled which doesn’t seem ideal? I’ll probably do that (if I can find time - adding the ward is a bit of a task), but I won’t fret about it!

5

I edited wiki, see Tag:boundary=political: Difference between revisions - OpenStreetMap Wiki

this is not needed and ideally would not be done

unlabelled in what? If you mean that ways do not have tags: this is normal and OK

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6

This issue is also described on this wiki page, which might need updating.

There is also this very confusing page which currently suggests that boundary=political should only be used on areas. I think that page could benefit from a general overhaul.

7

Actually, I updated that very section as recently as 27 February, and commented on the talk page inviting review by @Minh_Nguyen and @ZeLonewolf (who participated in the mailing list thread), but they apparently missed it, and then I forgot it. Granted, I did not check out the related pages (such as boundary=political) to ensure they were in sync. I guess this is a good time to overhaul the whole bunch.

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8

Sorry for the delay. The updates look fine to me.

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