I made these changes before I realized what the current community practice is, and although I find this practice incredibly hamfisted and meaningless, until the community can agree on a new, more meaningful and universally understandable set of terms to use with place=*, I concede that some of these changes perhaps should be reversed.

However, I will stand by certain ones even with the current broken OSM definitions. For example, the Rensselaer is a very small area, so it's total population might look the size of a "town," the central core of Rensselaer is just as dense and urban as Albany just across the river. In terms of "human geography" it is really just a part of Albany's urban landscape, and Albany's only train station is in fact in Rensselaer. Besides the fact that Resselaer is chartered as a "city" and is thought of by us locals as a city, it's clearly an urban environment as much as Albany is. If New York was like Europe or Japan, Rensselaer would be a part of Albany, but we just don't organize our communities that way. Rensselaer is a small slice of "city," not a "town" in the slightest.

While reviewing this edit, I noticed that that "random road" actually no longer exists. It sure did exist when I went to school there, and they made us run the miserable "turkey trot" along it every year in the miserable cold late fall, but that middle school and accursed superintendent's office are the last places on earth I ever want to be again, so I hadn't noticed until now what's changed.

I've just updated the roads there to reflect this reality.

I get that it's sometimes hard to list everything out. I think it's discouraged to make to many edits at once, but I don't play by those rules myself.

And I'm sorry if I'm being grumpy about it. This whole realization that the community is using the place=* feature in a way that is ham-fisted and meaningless to the way things work in America has got me riled up and miserable, and has finally convinced me that I need to step away from this crap for a while.

Your philosophy is wrong and this approach is ＠＠＠＠＠ wrong. I don't have to like it, but I am getting absolutely sick of trying to argue about it. If you don't want to see the light fine continue living in your goddam cave. I'm done with this.

I understand that you were working within the frameworks generally agreed upon by the community, and that that imperfect framework is the result of how the system has developed. I vehemently disagree with the current approach, as inconsequential it might be, because it seems so much more intuitive and natural to use our local, legal designations than some arbitrary classification that has nothing to do with our language or local customs.

"What you refer to as "local law" and wish to canonize is, in fact, almost a historical accident. " → this sentiment makes absolutely zero sense to me. Local law is absolutely what should be canonized, not some arbitrary outside perspective. Of course it's the result of historical developments that were not always precise and rational, what you call "accident," but so is every damn thing that is our society, our culture, our language, and yes our built environment. Imposing a flawless rational order on the messiness of humanity seems to me an overly obsessive and absurd compulsion.

I'm sorry that I've come at this issue in a highly emotionally charged way. Though I deeply disagree with the principles you came up with, I understand the effort you and others have put in to better organize the information of the map. I find the principles you were guided by as intrinsically imperialistic, as they impose an arbitrary outside order that means little to nothing to us locally, but I realize I should be careful not to condemn your own character in the processes.

I really need to move on with my life at this point. So this will be my last word on this. Maybe leveler heads can make a better system for place= in the future, but I knew from the start that wasn't just suddenly going to be me, and I'm done wasting my time screaming into the void.

No you can't. The current OSM definitions for place= are absolutely meaningless and arbitrary, like calling a large house an apartment. In order to know if something is an apartment you have to know the local customs, the economic and legal rules that define that building's usage. The same SHOULD be true for a village, town, city etc. The legal definitions are the only meaningful definitions and ignoring those in favor of a vague outside impression is like a foreigner walking into a Japanese shrine ground and calling it a mere garden because they don't understand the designation the culture has put on it.

I'm done moaning about this though. I knew I wouldn't convince anyone, and very few have even tried to sympathize with my perspective. I need to move on with my damn life and quit wasting time on this garbage.

Don't tell me to chill. You have no right to tell me what to care about or what not to care about. Just because something doesn't matter to you, doesn't mean it shouldn't matter to others.

I've already learned from elsewhere that most software ignores these damn stupid and unuseful designations for American places and instead uses the border_type=* key on the associated border of the place. The use of the place= is thus arbitrary and has no meaningful functionality. Thus how it is used seems to me a mere matter of principle, and I don't have to like the principles currently in mainstream use, but I admit that without meaningful consequence of those principles it's hardly worth screaming into the void much longer.

The Village of Woodridge cannot be defined merely by it's regular population. This village is dead for most of the year, but then summer comes around and the Jewish community comes up to the mountains and floods it with life and traffic. All the seasonal businesses open up, and it very much is a village by any definition.

This illustrates perfectly why you can't just scrape through the entire state of New York with your bots and your OCD and overturn the labels provided by our local laws, without understanding the local area and the people who call it home. It's condescending and imperialistic.

This "debate" is likely going to be just me screaming into the void if it continues, as I'm not about to convince the entire community that they're doing it wrong any time soon. It was over before it even began.

What I'll say to you Zack is, what the heck is up with "Few changes in a few places?!" Could you give an actual description of what you are changing and where so others can understand it and check it if necessary. Using that damn vague description of your changes for basically everything you change makes your edits seem highly suspicious.

Why is the point of the map to you to compare apples to apples? In the field of anthropology, such way of thinking has been greatly rejected as being imperialistic. They used to categorize people into "tribes" as opposed to "kingdoms" or "states," so that we could compare all the peoples of the world and try to say something about them, often about how some are more primitive than others. Can you see why this approach is condescending and fails to understand the intricate social structures particular to each individual culture? Right now this is what you are doing with the way place= terms are being used. Anthropology today now favors a more relativistic approach, one that tries to see cultures on their own terms.

I'm sorry you have no ability to understand how morally wrong this is.

Well it's not how it should work. This is stupid and I hate it, and I have brooding all the damn night about how wrong it is.

Using the types of place= this way is like calling something an apartment instead of a detached house just because it is large. The category we put buildings in is not based on how many people occupy that building or it's square footage, it's based on the socially, economically, and politically defined structure imposed on those building. A single family home could be a big McMansion being shared by a large multi-generation family, or an apartment building could be three or so separated stories with one tenant each that looks a lot like a house from the outside. Human's are not ants, you can't just categorize our built environment like you're some space alien from above who doesn't understand us. Roads, buildings, land use regions, everything else on the map is informed by the ways the locals use and categorize those things. I studied anthropology, and anthropologists know how imposing outside categories when describing a culture leads to misunderstanding, and rather they must try to understand the way that culture organize the world, and then find the best translations for that.

In the state of New York, the way we organize the world is legally defined and clear. These legal terms also are how we locally understand our places. Nobody in their right mind would call Scotia, NY a "town," as we all know it as "the village." Latham, NY is getting built up recently, but it's still mostly just suburban sprawl and strip malls, not much of a walkable village or "town" in the OSM sense. Rather, it's just one named center of the sprawling suburban landscape that is the Town of Colonie, that is to say it's a hamlet. You can't understand that just be looking at it's population. The village of Woodridge, NY is dead for most of the year, until summer hits and the Jewish community floods it with life and traffic. All it's business's are mostly open seasonally. Is Woodridge a itty-bitty backwoods "hamlet" in the OSM sense, or "village" or "town." You can't make these calls in any meaningful way without understanding the local customs, laws, and terminology. On the other hand, the State of New York has already created a system with which we designate our settlements, and it's clear and it's precise, and it's how we actually talk about our own places. Yet that useful and more culturally informed method of designation was washed away by one guy with his bots and his OCD.

Imagine if you were mapping Japan and you didn't know what shrines were so you marked them as gardens or parks? These places can look and feel a lot like a park, but in order to map it correctly, you have to understand what it means to the people who worship there. I could go on and on with the analogies. It is absolutely clear to me that the current way of dealing with hamlets, villages, towns, and cities on OSM is absolutely imperialistic and uninformative.

I did not quite know what I was talking about before, as I had made some assumptions from my vague impressions.

I just discovered that someone in 2022 changed all of NYs places to reflect their population and not how we designate them legally and culturally. I understand now that this is the current norm, but I am not happy about it.

Whether something is a village or town or city is highly arbitrary, whereas the legal designations are highly precise and highly meaningful. OCM is meant to be globally understood, and uses UK English as a base (boo), but concessions are made for clarity, like using sidewalk instead of pavement. In much of America, a village is often a more dense and urban-like experience than a town, because a town is a rather rural township. It is utterly confusing to me to call my hometown a town, because I grew up calling it a village while the rural place around it was the town. If we continue to use the place= value to reflect an informal, non-legal impression based mainly on population, it becomes highly confusing. Such a use of place= becomes absolutely worthless, while the important, concrete, legal and administrative information is buried away in tiny details.

Anyway, either way Storrs is not a suburb, it's definitely a village. Mansfield is farms and forest, not a town in the UK sense.

Why the crap should place= reflect size? That's not how things work in New York and you know it. If you want to know the size you can just look at the population.

Yes, I realize the hamlet got changed to a neighborhood. It was still named wrong and I renamed it corrected earlier today.

A town in Connecticut is not like a town in the UK or places that would use similar language. A town in Connecticut is similar to my homestate of NY, it's a division of a county. A town could have absolutely nobody living in it, and in fact they are usually quite rural. Even by your definition of a suburb, Storrs is NOT a part of that kind of "town." It's a population center, a settlement in an otherwise rural backwoods landscape, ie the town of Mansfield. It's not a suburb of Mansfield because Mansfield is not a large, dense population center.

OSM definitions are guidelines for the community, but it makes absolutely no logical sense to use it's categories in a way that makes zero sense to local residents, the people who might actually want to use this map, and goes against our legal designations. Go look all around CT, new England, NY all of the US, and you will find that the map uses the terms village, hamlet, town, etc in line with their official regional designation. Changing the US sections of the map to follow more closely to UK/world English norms would be insane and imperialistic.

Connecticut does not have hamlets. CT uses the word "village" for unincorporated settlements. Borough is used instead for incorporated settlements. Storrs, CT is "village" in the town of Mansfield, one comprised entirely around the University campus, it is absolutely not a suburb, it's in the middle of rural nowhere rather, and generally not a place people who work in Hartford might life. Until recently all that downtown stuff didn't exist either.

When deciding whether something is or isn't a "hamlet" or a "village" or something, you cannot just read the wiki and use it's general definition. You have to be mindful of our local customs and legal designations.

In MA a "village" is not an official designation; it's more like what we call "hamlets" in NY. These three places were historically considered "villages" and this editor must have seen their names come up in a list of MA villages.

Hmm, so I've looked at the wiki and the discussion you mentioned, and I see that this is an annoyingly complicated issue. It seems there are two main camps - the camp that says old_name is better and was:name has no place, vs. the camp that says these two tags mean different things. The case for the former camp seems to be that (A) old_name is more widespread already anyway, and (B) Nominatim doesn't pick up was:name diminishing its potential usefulness.

To the latter camp though, old_name is for when the current object changed names, but is still the same thing, while was:name is for when it changed into something different, not just changed names. If we were to adopt that style, then this building definitely should use was:name, not old_name, because it's not a Christian church anymore, it's a Guyanese Hindu temple.

What do you think about this though? It seems like you're more in the camp that says just always use old_name for stuff like this.

Ok, so if was:name was not what I was supposed to use, why does it even exist then? It comes up when you start typing "was:" in the editor.

I see. Thank you for the explanation. I'll try to avoid little mistakes like that in the future.