As a long time NH resident, I’d keep it simple and just use a single border_type. The proposed border_types “purchase”, “grant” or “location” are part of the name and are tied to their history. Functionally they’re the same thing, adding types doesn’t add value in my view.
Colloquially, I have heard some people use grants or purchases when they really mean unincorporated areas. In my experience, that’s more common with native-born locals who are long time residents. The new(er) residents I know tend to refer to refer to them as Unincorporated Places or Unincorporated Towns.
Local perspective appreciated! I think as long as we document that such “simplification” or “grouping” (depending on how you look at it and wish to simplify or expand) I think we’re OK to simplify to a single border_type.
If (more-local-than-me) people could look at United States admin level - OpenStreetMap Wiki and United States/Boundaries - OpenStreetMap Wiki and see if the table entries for these three states are correct, mostly-correct / need small tweaks, or just-plain-wrong, please either say so here (and I’ll transcribe into these wiki) or please fix up the wiki directly yourself. Or, offer a thumbs-up that they are correct now, but I don’t think all three states perfectly reflect what we’re saying here. As is obvious in the first wiki, footnotes are OK! Thanks in advance.
With our good, open communication, timely editing / updating of our data, and especially local perspective on “the right thing(s) to do,” this (admin_level tweaking) seems to be working pretty well.
Edit: If something is really distinguished as a township or a gore or something specific, and OSM uses border_type to denote exactly what those things are, OSM should continue to hew to that. Otherwise, we devolve into (in some cases) “older people call it what it is, but younger people group these together like this” in a way where we don’t know what anything is any longer. The answer is “it is both a [township, gore…] (in this state, we say that is an 8) AND it is unincorporated.” We have tables in our wiki where we fit the pieces together in a (sane, if only slightly crazy) manner, but we manage to do that fairly well, as best we can. Because we sort of talk it to death, but we do make sure we agree along the way.
I also agree that all unincorporated places in NH should share the same border_type. There are some distinctions between different unincorporated places (do they run their own elections or not), but those distinctions are not reflected in the place name.
To recap, focusing on New Hampshire for a moment, it appears we have not yet reached consensus on this point. @Mapiate says these should be “kept simple (as) a single border_type” while Zeke and I (any others?) feel that since we use border_type to denote a “border type,” that any sort of semantic flattening (simplification) would be an exception that breaks this rule. I hope I’m getting that right, Zeke, I don’t want to put words in anybody’s mouth.
Saying (as @Mapiate does) that “functionally, (different border_type) values are the same thing” is like saying “in all 50 states, counties are the same thing, so we should call Louisiana’s parishes and Alaska’s divisions the same thing, as they function similarly.” No, they aren’t, and no, we shouldn’t.
Again, OSM can be proud that we so carefully denote these subtle differences (in USA’s admin_level and border_type tagging). While it isn’t saying much to utter this, I know of no other map in existence that is so careful to make these distinctions. Indeed, the Census Bureau does this sort of semantic flattening (every five years as they recategorize everything) when they toss things into a bucket called “county equivalent.” Let them, but let OSM continue to keep in sharp focus these subtle yet distinct differences. As Zeke says, “it’s easy enough to match on all four tags.” If you are “in” (working with data of) New Hampshire, it is simply a fact for you to be aware of that “there are four of these things, with four different names, that behave similarly or even identically, but they are called different things for historical reasons — oh yeah, there IS that reality.” It’s OK that colloquially (thanks for the links, David) in New Hampshire (citizens and state court websites) these are referred to by “vernacular groupings.” And OSM should denote this. But we do this in our wiki as a short blurb in a table entry, where people know to do this conflation, not in our data, where we would be conflating / flattening in a way that hides the truth from data seekers.
Otherwise, we devolve into a patchwork of “well, in New England (or any specific state), you simply must KNOW that we conflated four values into one single colloquial vernacular term.” Let’s keep such information in our table, accessible to all, and similar data exist for the whole of the USA, as they should. I’d rather not “play favorites” (for New Hampshire, or any state) by making such an exception.
I was under the impression, and this may be HIGHLY simplistic on my part, that border_type was really about what a boundary was called. And so border_type=city means it’s called a city even if it’s low population and border_type=town is because it’s called a town, even if it’s larger than some cities and so forth. It seems like just tagging them what they’re called is the easiest way to do this?
Brian, I’ll say “By George, I think you’ve GOT it!”
Let admin_level describe what OSM means by admin_level. Let border_type denote a border_type (what it is called as a type of border). Any categorization can (and should!) happen in our table, that’s what it is for, that’s what it does.
Nope, I don’t have strong feelings on this at all. I want to be able to distinguish unorganized towns from organized towns that’s all I really care about. If there are four values for unorganized towns I can union those all together, if there is one value that works just as well.
OK, you are talking about your particular use case, where it is less important to make the distinction under certain circumstances.
I’m talking about how to keep the data consistent for everyone, where we have established particular meanings for particular taggings, and asking that we maintain that consistency.
Zeke and I can certainly peacefully and harmoniously co-exist if we keep all four tags. David, by conflating, makes an exception to our consistency. Again, I’d rather we not do that, as “oops, there goes the neighborhood.”
Look, it’s 100% fine that we have such “local quirks.” It’s wonderful, in fact, and wonderful that OSM can denote these. We’ve established methods to do this, although having plastic tagging has allowed some squishiness to creep in at times. I think I’m simply advocating “status quo tagging” by my stated preferences here.
I think this makes for a good rule of thumb. I would only draw the line at legal fictions like Indian Hill, Ohio, which styles itself as a “village” but is a city for all intents and purposes. It would be included in any list of cities in the state and omitted from any list of villages, despite having changed the official name to “The City of The Village of Indian Hill” (capitalized exactly thus). By contrast, in California, there’s no practical difference between a city and a town, so adopting “town” in the name is the same as becoming a town in that state.
Our wiki table reflects this with the usual admonishment about mentioning both “City” and “Town” in a California context, which is “synonymous by law.” See, I think we can (continue to) do this: put categorizations in the table (explaining the esoterica in a footnote, with great precedence at doing so) and for all intents and purposes I currently imagine, all will be well.
The specific name or kind of a border? That’s why (and what and where) we use border_type.
I do my best to be a decent scribe, at least. Please, state how it’s going to be among New Englanders, I guess is what I’m saying; stepping aside. Let the rest of us know how it is and we’ll tighten up the wiki. Somewhere around there works.
I also don’t have super strong feelings on the topic. Nor am I looking to make an exception for NH compared to the rest of the New England states or the USA in general. My intent was to just share some local context.
As long as it’s documented for others in the OSM community and data consumers I can support either approach to keep moving forward. There’s always the option to revisit the topic and refine it later.
Thank you for chiming in as New Hampshire residents, @Mapiate and @AntiCompositeNumber! I suppose the challenge with choosing one border_type value for all New Hampshire unorganized administrative areas, is that that it’s not clear what that one value should be. Do you have a recommendation? Is there an official term the state government uses to include all unorganized areas regardless of whether the name ends in location, purchase, grant, or none of the three?
If we proceed with four values it’s pretty clear which areas should be purchase, grant, and location. However, there are a number of unorganized areas like Dixville, Odell, and Millsfield that have no such qualifying term in the name. Wikipedia seems to consistently call them “townships”, but I haven’t been able to find that term on any New Hampshire government documents so far. I’m wondering if Wikipedia authors are just using Maine’s official term for the same concept. I’ve seen them called “unorganized towns” (same as Vermont), “unincorporated towns”, or just “unincorporated places” . So it seems there is a somewhat unclear decision to make even if we do opt for four values. What is the New Hampshire resident perspective on which term to use for a border_type value?
Purchase, Grant, and Location are not legal designations and are not used consistently for different unincorporated places. For example, Hart’s Location is an incorporated town.
The state is fairly consistent in using “unincorporated places” (which is the term used in state law and the constitution), occasionally using “unorganized areas”. Coös County also uses “unincorporated places” consistently.
Based on User talk:Nyttend/Archive 7 - Wikipedia (discussion interleaved with User talk:Ken Gallager/Archive 3 - Wikipedia ), Wikipedia uses “township” as a descriptive term that is considered to be generally recognizable. National news media reporting on the NH primary/Dixville Notch often explain it as a township, but I expect this to be mostly citogenesis. Local sources tend to refer to places by name only or as unincorporated, though the word “township” is occasionally used. Both local and national sources use township to refer to incorporated towns .
tl;dr unincorporated_place if we’re being technical about it, but township is probably good enough.
A reminder (the odd counter-example of Palmyra Island was offered earlier): being unincorporated is not the same as being unorganized. These are distinct. As best we know them, OSM should denote these as distinctly as we are able, with little or no misunderstanding or fogginess of denotation. If there is a categorization, it will likely fall into a pattern like we see in US_admin_level’s “big table” and should be easily describable in a table row entry (a footnote can clarify). Concepts, ideas and words here, first and welcome, of course. And no rush, let’s get it right, not necessarily fast. These things are nuanced and belong to “the local People” as far as I’m concerned. I love there are any number of New Englanders chiming in here. Sensing consensus ahead!
Huh. This is the first time I’ve heard this said. I guess “unorganized” is the looser state of being? And unincorporated maybe means there’s a boundary and name but no municipal corporation? Is there a sharper definition?
Unorganized vs unincorporated was discussed upthread:
Maine’s Plantations are an example of an organized but unincorporated entity. As far as I can tell, all the other unorganized administrative areas across VT, NH, and ME are both unorganized and unincorporated.
No, “unorganized” is not the looser state of being. And we can’t let “never heard of it” get in the way of good denotation, as full (-er) understanding of this is required if we are going to agree to tag sanely.
“Organized” sometimes happens (at a federal, like Samoa, or any state level) with an “organized Act.” This establishes “a form of government” (where there was none before). Incorporation is an additional, actually optional, step, although a great many “municipalities” (in the sense of the 50 states, not in the sense of how the federal government classifies such things in the territories) DO also incorporate. This is the USA’s familiar “municipal corporation” (As City of XYZ: it can issue bonds, incurring debt, it can incur civil liability…much like a “corporation” that trades on a stock market or is owned privately).
I am not a lawyer, a political scientist or a terribly deep reader of this particular topic, but I have read some. Try https://www.senate.ga.gov/committees/Documents/CarlVinsonSummaryMunicipalIncorporationProceduresbyState.pdf for a flavor of how different the procedures are for incorporation in each state. And again, “an Organic Act to create the so-and-so government of the (island of…) XYZ…” is how legislation that “initiates politicalness” is often written as a preamble. Organized does not equal incorporated. Unorganized does not equal unincorporated.
Let’s get this right. I try to wear very big-boy pants here, but I also know when I’m out of my league. Ideally, we might want a political scientist from New England who is an OSM mapper familiar with admin_level tagging, but I realize that is a tall order. (Nonetheless, I now ring that bell).
Sounds like unincorporated_place would be the most appropriate value. I suppose there is a slight risk of mappers in other parts of the country getting the wrong idea and applying this value to unincorporated places elsewhere that have no administrative boundary. That may not matter much though. I wouldn’t want to use township if it isn’t a term actually used for these in New Hampshire, but if it is that seems fine.
Putting sharp focus on this point, we are talking about unincorporated_place as a value for the border_type key. Zeke’s imagined scenario is a valid “runaway idea” another mapper might get again someday, though I think that what we’re discovering is that is going to happen in ways the syntax will keep appropriate. (It’s working). I haven’t checked, I imagine unincorporated_place is somewhere around rare as a value or key, though we should check.
A can of worms remains open, but we’re documenting this with short blurbs. This can of worms being “what we mean by unincorporated place with that value.” That might always remain open and wriggling, it could remain difficult to well-interpret by many, or we might use some words to seal it up. It’s like US History class (5th, 8th and 11th grade mandatory in my state) around here!
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