Minh Nguyen, gdt, you two are the only people I’ve talked to about this so far that at least understand my perspective and admit the current system has it’s problems. Against my better judgement I have been posting comments on changes concerning this issue up and down the map today, and the vast majority of people just obliviously refuse to understand the relativistic nature of place terminology and that municipalities are the purview of socially constructed reality, not a reality we can easily define through universal and objective principles. I don’t think ke9tv gets this either.

Let’s face it, all of us are basically broken, neurodivergent people who have found that contributing to this map can momentarily satiate that unquenchable burning in our brain that needs to impose meaningful order on the anxiety inducing chaos that is life. I get it. What I take issue with is a naive mentality that insists on imposing artificial order on what is supposed to be a messy, organic reality. Every one of us probably had that time in life when we could not get over the fact that English spelling is not perfectly rational and phonetic, that it has weird quirks and exceptions. I sure was that kid once, but eventually I learned linguistics and the beautiful and organic evolution that lead to our quirky spellings, and now I see it as wonderful, not infuriating. ke9tv seems to be displaying that kind of narrow and obsessive understanding to what hamlet, village, town, and city should mean. He calls New York’s designations, “messy” and the result of “historical accident.” What he calls “messy” I call our reality. What he calls “accident,” I call organic development. It’s like he learned what these words “should” mean as a kid and refuses to evolve his understanding to fit actual social usage, and then just resents it. To me, the forms of government ABSOLUTELY are what defines a village verses a town verses a city, because these are what form the foundation of our social reality and constructed environments, and trying to organize it any other way imposes a naive and arbitrary order that is unnatural and meaningless to me.

For example if you live in a village in NY, you very likely have sidewalks, because the statewide village law stipulates regulations that encourage sidewalks. Towns often do not. You can often know you have left the Village of Scotia when the sidewalk ends. This physical aspect of our built environment is bound up in the political structure of our community. Yes we have tiny cities and large villages, but so what? Why should we abhor this reality and insist in a much more simplistic and rudimentary understanding of what these terms should mean? Just like the actual intricacies of English spelling can have a perfectly valid logic of their own, the way the State of New York designates its places has a perfectly valid reasoning to it; it’s just not the simplistic one the OSM guidelines and current community practice espouse.

The more I think about it, using the US Census Bureau concepts for place=* sounds more and more like a great idea to me, so I encourage you to keep pushing it, or some similar reform. Since I understand now that the border_type=* is doing the much more important work of giving the actual state designations, the incorporated/unincorporated distinction of the US Census Bureau would make place=* designations work together with border_type=* designations to make the nature of different state’s hamlets/villages vs. villages/boroughs more clear, making the thing do something actually useful instead of just arbitrarily organizing places into childish categories.

I’m too much of a miserable, anti-social nutjob to join forums and engage more deeply with the community on this. I have to take care of my own mental health and dealing with thoughtless conformists insisting I’m wrong does not help. I thank you two for at least engaging with my thoughts and feelings, and kindly explaining to me how the current state of things came to be.

I look forward to any progress you get changing how place= works so that it might reflect something more meaningful to the actual locality. I for the time being need to find a way to just get over it, as obviously I have better, more healthy things to do with my life than moan about how OSM tags work. I realized from the start that I would just be screaming into the void getting worked up about this, but I hope you can understand at least why I had such an emotional reaction to this seemingly benign thing.

Ok, you’ve quenched my fury a bit. I commend you on your disarming ability to sympathize with my cause. Real conflict resolutions skills there.

I understand now how this flaw in the system and its practices I’ve stumbled into and have gotten worked up about is sort of a “known bug,” that it’s a feature of how the convoluted system has evolved and that the community is already figuring out ways to better work around it. It’s rather infuriating that basically the terminology is convoluted and confusing in that way, and as you can tell from my experience it is exceedingly unintuitive for people just getting started contributing.

I still don’t like it of course, and I what I don’t understand is if the exact designation of place= doesn’t matter that much, why the heck did ke9tv here have to go and change every place in New York to be based entirely on population? Can we just get rid of place= designations for municipalities entirely, and just use something more generic? If we can’t do that, and it’s a matter of which obsessive compulsion wins out, then ke9tv’s obsessive compulsion to make the place= match population size is no more valid than my desire to have this designation aligned with their official designations. If it doesn’t actually matter, why not do it the way I’d like? Ugh, it’s just so frustratingly arbitrary and obnoxious.

And why should place= be used “somewhat irrespective of government structures??” Would you call something an apartment building just because it is large? Would you call a garden “farmland” because it has some carrots growing in it? Would you call any large church a “cathedral” irrespective of whether or not it’s the seat of a bishop? Would you call a Japanese shrine a park because you can’t understand how they worship?

Houses, apartments, etc are not defined by size. They are defined by the socially, economically, and politically defined systems that govern their use. 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 its 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 its businesses are mostly open seasonally. Is Woodridge an 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.

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. Anthropologists used to be in the business of “categorizing” people and their cultures with broad brush strokes to compare humans: this culture lives in a tribe, while this one a more developed “kingdom,” and these in a complex “state.” 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. For the people of the State of New York and anywhere in the US, that means that if we say it’s a village and not a town, than goddamnit it’s a village!

This is not how the state of New York works and I don’t like or approve of the way you have ruined the map. Population is an arbitrary and stupid way to decide if something is a village, town, city or not. It does not take into account density, number of shops and business, how walkable a place is, all the sorts of things that might factor in to whether a place feels like sleepy village or an urban metropolis, or anything in between. On the other hand, the legal designations that the state of New York uses for our municipalities are clear and meaningful rules. More importantly, they are form the language that we are used to using about our places. A New York town is usually an low-density rural place, while a village is actually usually a higher density place within that town. When my friend moved to Glenville and felt far away from us in Scotia, I and our friends would say “remember when he lived in the village?” Any New Yorker looking at the map after what you’ve done to it wont understand what the heck they are seeing. There’s no reason the place= designation needs to reflect population. Population is listed as it’s own piece of information, and it makes exceedingly more sense if place= designates some formal, legal, and meaningful information to the people to whom that place is home.