@Mateusz Konieczky We're ahead of you on that. In New York, at least, we tag the form of government - the "local law" that @RDreher is referring to - on the boundary relation as 'border_type'. (Unfortunately, 'admin_level' is problematic for this: New York's municipal structure is kind of chaotic and not always hierarchical. We don't have overlaps at the same admin_level¸ but it's not guaranteed that an admin_level=8 is contained in exactly one admin_level=7. Cities cross county lines, villages cross township lines, and so on. The place=* nodes that RDreher is complaining about are all members of boundary relations.

Please don't jump to conclusions. I have no objection whatsoever to overriding the 'place=*' assignment for Woodridge. (As far as I can remember, I've never been there.)

When I started the exercise, virtually all the 'place=*' nodes for New York municipalities came from an earlier import. They were full of inappropriate assignments, some quite egregious, because they were all based on the form of government. What you refer to as "local law" and wish to canonize is, in fact, almost a historical accident. There are small cities, such as Brentwood and Levittown (each of which has over 60,000 inhabitants) that were classed as 'place=hamlet' because they have no local government other than their containing townships. There were nearly uninhabited places (population of no more than a few hundred), such as Red House, Hardenburgh, and Arietta, that were classed as 'place=town' simply because they're townships. There was also a 'place=town' for the defunct settlement of Tusten (burnt to the ground in the French and Indian War, and never rebuilt), because that's the name of the township whose seat of government is Narrowsburg. There was a 'place=city' on the small village of Sherrill, because it has a city charter. The Village of Hempstead, also a small city, was 'place=village' because that is its form of government.

There were dozens, if not hundreds, of such inversions, because in New York, the form of government is at most only loosely correlated with the size or importance of a place, which is what 'place=*' is supposed to represent. 'Town of', in particular, predicts nothing. The entire state is carved up into townships, whose populations range from a few dozen to a few million. But 'village', 'hamlet' and even 'city' are only a little more predictive. A legal 'hamlet' can be a city of 60,000 and a legal 'city' can be a village of 3000.

Of course, the political organization of the state is also important. It is retained on all the boundary relations. If you look at the boundary of Woodridge, you will be able to discern that it is incorporated as a village.

Population was simply the most obvious surrogate to use that was available for all the places. The change was discussed fairly extensively on the forums at the time, and the conclusion was that it was most likely to be an overall improvement, even if it might damage some boundary cases. Places whose 'place=*' was changed from the original import were left alone.

In reviewing the changes, I did make some overrides for places that I knew. Saranac Lake, for instance, got upgraded to a 'town' despite its tiny size, because it has the only commercial airport, the only hospital, and the only large department store for many miles around; it is the market center serving a large hinterland. I also upgraded a few communities like Watertown and Binghamton to cities even though they didn't quite meet the (somewhat arbitrary) population cutoff.

The intent was to clean up an unholy mess coming from an import and at least have a place hierarchy that roughly reflected reality on the ground, not to run roughshod over the locals! (A related project reimported political boundaries; what existed before the reimport was truly wretched.)

In reviewing the 'place=*' nodes, I also added the Yiddish names for several places where it is the majority language, or at least a significant minority, for example Kiryas Joel, New Square, and Kaser,
added Seneca names for places in western New York on and near the reservations (using a list provided by the Seneca Nation).

In short, condemning the entire effort as 'condescending and imperialistic' without considering whether it was an improvement of what has come before it is expecting unachievable perfection. Truly, I'm doing what I can, and doing my best to defer to the locals!

I deleted The Powerlinez from the Harriman Park boundary because the area directly under the power llines and the access road down to Torne Brook road are actually outside Harriman State Park. The State Park boundary is correct. (The power line right-of-way belongs to the power company and the access road belongs to the county. Not sure about who owns the Saltbox House area, but it's not the state.)

You seem to have captured nicely what place=* is trying to achieve, and you're more familiar with the ground truth than I am. Make it so! (If you upgrade Cornwall to place=town, then downgrade Firthcliffe to place=locality.)

The admin boundary will render nicely without a label node, in the default rendering. The idea behind having a label node on each admin boundary is that a non-default rendering that focuses on political boundaries should be able to place labels by finding nodes in the boundary relation with the 'label' role. (The default OSM rendering doesn't do this, but OSM is all about the data, not the default rendering.)

I've _been_ to the area to hike in Storm King, Black Rock Forest and Schunnemunk, but I think I've stopped in the town only once, about 25 years ago, when my daughter wound up in the ER there after a traffic accident in Woodbury/Central Valley. So my input to this project consisted mostly in cleaning up an unholy mess from the TIGER imports. Now that you understand the schema, feel free to repair the details.

Are you talking about place nodes, or admin boundaries? The terms are used differently on the two.

On place nodes, the tag refers always to the importance of the place and never to the form of government. city > town > village > hamlet. This mostly got assigned by population, but there were a few overrides. The one that sticks in my mind is that Saranac Lake is tiny, but got `town` anyway because it has the only hospital and the only airport for many miles around.

Doing it this way rather than by form of government is essential to getting the labels right and having them appear at the right zoom levels. Despite being legally a 'hamlet', Brentwood is a small city of >60,000 inhabitants. By contrast, the City of Sherrill is a village of fewer than 3,000 souls

On boundary relations, the border_type indicates what sort of municipality is enclosed: city, borough, town, village, hamlet (ward, community district, ...). In some cases these are coterminous with Census-Determined Places, so you'll see 'hamlet;CDP' on a bunch of them.

New York doesn't have 'townships' - that's a term from other states that's often used in common speech in New York to describe the land belonging to a town.

What I suspect confused you is that the two places you mentioned (Newburgh, Cornwall) represent two fairly common corner cases. In the case of Newburgh, there are two distinct municipalities: the Town of Newburgh, and the City of Newburgh. Neither is subject to the other. The settlement commonly called Newburgh has a place=town node. (It was just short of the significance needed for place=city.) The Town of Newburgh doesn't include that city, it's basically what was left over after the city was chartered.
Because it messes up rendering if an admin boundary doesn't have a label, there's an arbitrary node created for it - and included as the 'label' member of the boundary relation. This node is tagged place=locality not:place=town because there's no settlement of the given name where the node is placed.

Similarly, the Town of Cornwall is a higher-level admin entity. The Village of Cornwall-on-Hudson is within its borders and subject to it (Village governments have limited powers, and many government functions remain with the town). Moreover, 'Cornwall' and 'Cornwall-on-Hudson' are distinct names. Once again, there's an arbitrary label created for the Town.

These arbitrary labels - there are a bunch of them - are all tagged not:place=town so that future mappers don't mistakenly conflate them with settlements that are distinct from them.

There are other corner cases that you'll likely stumble on: villages that are in more than one town (Sorry. It is what it is); consolidated town/village (where a village annexed an entire town but the village government was not disbanded); former villate that disincorporated and was demoted to a hamlet (e.g. Rosendale), chartered city entirely on the land of an Indian Reservation (Salamanca); a village located entirely outside the town of the same name and still housing the town's administrative offices (there are one or two of these, but I've mercifully forgotten where they are); and so on. They're all handled the same way: a `boundary=administrative` relation for every municipality (and some hamlets - others don't have defined borders), a `place` node for every named settlement (always tagged according to importance not government), and an artificial `place=locality not:place=town` node for those Towns that either don't have a settlement with the same name as the town, or have the named settlement outside the town's borders.

The other oddity you might see is that the town of Palm Tree, the villages of Kiryas Joel, New Square and Kaser, and a number of settlements on the reservations in the western part of the state are named in the local language (Yiddish for the first four; one or another of the Haundenosaunee languages for the ones on the reservations). This is intentional; English is not the majority languages in those places. (By the way, the unusual Unicode for the character in names like Onë꞉dagö꞉h that looks like a colon is also intentional. That character is a letter of the Seneca alphabet and not a punctuation mark.)

Yeah, it's complicated. New York's government structure is, uhm, not straightforward.

Oops. You're right, of course. I simply added the tagging to the wrong way.

(The sign has varied. Sometimes it's just been the regular Winnisook Club poster. And there have been hikers hassled by club members who don't know that it's a public road.)

The New York City DEP map at https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloads/pdf/recreation/area-maps/Angle_Fly.pdf shows this area as two separate properties with different ownership and access restrictions. The west one is owned by New York City Bureau of Water Supply, and the east one is Town of Somers. Should the boundary of 'Angle Fly Preserve' be adjusted so that it does not encompass the NYC 'Angle Fly Unit'?

Ok, I see Yankee Smith now, right where it should be. The incomplete and disconnected waterways confused me, and fixing that has been on my 'to do' list for years now.

USGS topos from different editions disagree on the 'Dutcher Creek' name. The innkeeper at Winter Clove, and the newer series of topos, call it 'Countryman Kill'. Not seeing that name also confused me.

Now I recall coming OUT from Little Stoppel down the Winter Clove Falls trail because nobody in the group wanted to push back through all that laurel, so we dropped off the ridge down to the Kiskatom as soon as we could. As I said, it's been a few years. I have no objection to leaving out the trail to Stoppel Point. DEC has obviously tried to suppress it.

Oops, you were editing multiples... I meant, the one that you marked "Winter Clove Falls Trail" is Yankee Smith. Also, we should tag `informal-yes` on the Winter Clove trails that are on state land and don't have state blazes, and probably warn about `trail_visibility` also. The last time I did Little Stoppel Point from the Escarpment, I very occasionally spotted a painted-out blaze where the grey-brown overlay that the state put on it was wearing to reveal the unauthorized paint underneath, and there was a lot of pushing through mountain laurel to follow the 'trail'. But that was a few years ago, and I know that a lot of the herd paths are getting much more beaten in.

Isn't this one named, "Yankee Smith Trail"?

I chose to include Haudenosaunee toponyms, where I had them, on places
enclosed by the Six Nations' land claims that remain alive in the
current era. Those include
relation/13737250 - where the Oneida
still retain a degree of sovereignty over any land to which they hold
title. (The 2013 settlement agreement is complex.)

Oneida is the only city or town of any size for which this might cause
confusion, I think, and I wouldn't kick too hard if you wanted to
downgrade `name` (as long as `name:one` is retained.)

The other communities that are affected either are Haudenosaunee
settlements (as with the bunch of hamlets that you'll see near
osm.org/#map=15/42.5344/-78.9940), communities
adjacent to the reservations that the nations specifically wanted
listed bilingually (e.g. Gowanda, Irving, Taylor Hollow, Versailles),
or communities that one of the nations owns outright. City of
Salamanca, for instance, despite being 90+% White, stands on land
owned by the Seneca nation - the residents are all renters! Given
that status, it's arguable that Onë꞉dagö꞉h _is_ the official name.

An increasing number of communities are starting to have their
Haudenosaunee names appear on the NY DOT signs, such as
https://image.advance.net/home/adv-media/width2048/img/newyorkupstatecom_national_desk_blog/photo/2016/10/24/seneca-signjpg-584c5b2882aa5f13.jpg
If the highway signs give "ohi꞉yoʾ" as the name of Town of Allegany,
that sounds fairly official to me. (But did they really need to
put it in Comic Sans?)

> Whilst it's OK to use multiple accounts (I use 4 for different things), it's only fair on other OSM contributors to edit the profile of each and make it clear that they're just a "sock puppet" of another user, so that people don't communicate with them thinking they are an unconnected user.

@SomeoneElse:
For what it's worth, the set of aliases that I and others found included:

AlexCleary, BrianDillman, BobKelly, JimTracy, JoelManagua, JOetlikers, JoseDeSilva, Nia-gara, NYbuildings, NorthFork, PeterKing, RI-Improve, RickMaldonado, RobertReynolds as well as miluethi.

The original user was less than forthcoming about these; most were discovered by the detective work of other users. I'm less than 100% confident that we caught them all, but I've got the scripts on [Github](https://github.com/kennykb/NYbuildings_repair) against the possibility of finding others.

In response to your message, I doublechecked the `ke9tv_NYbuildings_repair` user; whew! I didn't forget to link back to myself.

Would need three relations, one for each hamlet, and one for the Census Determined Place (because that's the one with a tabulated population, a FIPS code, and so on.) I'm happy to leave just the CDP boundary for now.

`building`=* goes on individual buildings, not on a lot that contains buildings.

way/1077506647 looks like an awfully large single building, and it overlaps Three MIle Harbor Road. Did you perhaps mean to tag this as `landuse=construction construction=residential` to show this is a plot of land being developed?

In the 'better late than never' department, I'm going through all of NY's municipal boundaries, comparing against TIGER/Line 2021 and NYSGIS Minor Civil Divisions. I'm finally getting down into the Five Towns (I'm a Five Towns native, so this area is familiar!)

This boundary should be tidied in changeset [122553998](https://osmcha.org/changesets/122553998/?)

Can we discuss this? I'd have appreciated a changeset comment rather than just a revert!

I'm having it hard to see how you could have made a change like this with only Bing as a source. You appear to be moving the boundary, for instance, close to the highway center line of Mineola Avenue. When I look at either the tax maps or the NYSGIS boundary data, I see the line following the right-of-way on the west side, which extends some fifty feet from the center, leaving Roslyn with the maintenance rather than Roslyn Estates. That does make the boundary cut through a few private houses near the corners, but that's not all that uncommon a thing to see. It means that the landowners at those corners will have their property taxes apportioned among the villages - that happens any time the boundary cuts through a lot and is very common.

II's popular to say and assume that the line between two villages on Long Island is a particular street, but it's actually commoner for it to be offset from the street - so the villages don't have to fight over who has to maintain it.

I see that you're local, so I'm not going to step on what you did. If you have better sources than I do, I want to know about them - NY boundaries have long been a horrible mess, and I'm making a systematic effort to get them cleaned up. I don't want us to be stepping on each other's feet!

Thanks for noticing this! The `hamlet;CDP` on the boundary was a
copy-and-paste problem - I wasn't intentionally updating `place`=*
on boundaries, only on the nodes.

As far as the choice of the `place`=* value, let me begin by observing
that this edit is part of a months-long systematic review of NY admin
boundaries against the authoritative data in NYSGIS (for counties,
towns, cities and villages), and the updated CDP boundaries in
TIGER/Line 2021. The chief focus is on correct topology (all boundaries
closed; no crossing boundaries; townships and counties share boundary ways,
etc.) and correct geometry (for instance, getting the line between
New York County and Bronx County to follow the former line of the
Spuyten Duyvil Kill correctly, rather than being glued to nearby streets).

In the course of doing that, missing associations between boundary and label,
missing town and village halls, and cross references to GNIS, FIPS code,
and NY statewide-information-system code (SWIS) are also being corrected,
and Wikidata/Wikipedia links are being verified.

The tagging is being made consistent. There has been off-and-on active
discussion over the last six months or so on Slack and on
talk-us-newyork about what correct tagging for some of these features
is, and I agree that what's being done doesn't quite align with the
current consensus. Nevertheless, the commenters seem to be willing to
accept my contention that 'wrong consistently' is the way to go for
the moment, allowing me to focus on the completeness of the
information and the accuracy of the geometry - which is entirely hard
enough!

Once there's a tagging consensus, and in another month or two when the
remaining boundaries are updated (there are just New York City and the
two Long Island counties left to finish) it will be easy to go back
with a mechanical edit and update things - removing `place`=* from
boundaries, tagging town halls as something other than the
`admin_centre` of the towns, respelling CDP as `census_determined` or
whatever. That will also let us sort out what should be retained if,
as here, a census-determined place and a township-decreed hamlet are
precisely coterminous.

Current practice is that it's OK to remove them, but it isn't necessary. I've been removing them whenever I have any other reason to edit a municipal boundary, but not seeking them out.

Lately I've been doing a comprehensive review of NY municipal boundaries, so I've been removing a lot of boundary tags on ways, but removing them wasn't the point - getting them correctly aligned was. As part of the process I've been correcting wrong admin_levels, making sure that everything has Wikipedia/Wikidata links, updating populations to the 2020 census, and so on, so there's a lot of retagging going on.

Changeset comment s/b Town of Stockport; hamlet/CDP of Stottville; Stottville needs conflation in Town of Greenport