I thought a town had to have a market charter? Or did that rule go the same way as cities and cathedrals? Braunton in Devon, for example, claims to be the largest village in England (though there are several disputing claims), and I was under the impression that its claim rested on it never having been granted a market charter. Harry Mitchellhttp://enwp.org/User:HJ Phone: +44 (0) 7507 536971 Skype: harry_j_mitchell From: Lester Caine lester@lsces.co.uk To: wikimediauk-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Monday, 14 September 2015, 9:02 Subject: Re: [Wikimediauk-l] Village, Hamlet and populations ...
On 14/09/15 08:09, Rod Ward wrote:
I don't think defining hamlet v village by size of population is useful. Hamlet (place) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamlet_(place)#United_Kingdom ) under UK explores the difference the difference between civil parish and ecclesiastical parish and uses the traditional "settlement without a church".
It's the OSM definitions which need re-jigging here That is actually more my target although it is perhaps useful that the ONS data does not list any places which we would probably refer to as hamlets. The problem of cause with OSM is it's trying to apply one rule world wide, when country related rules would be more practical.
Another complication is the division between village and town (complicated by legislation allowing parish councils to adopt the term town council). An example local to me is the ongoing debate (slow edit war) between Cheddar, Somerset a village with a population of 5,755 and Axbridge a town with a population of 2,057.
Actually the Facebook approach of everything is a city does avoid that, but yes while city is a legal entity, town is a little woolly. My own local one is Broadway which plans to remain a 'Cotswold village' despite the large number of housing developments which would distort that.
My real target here is some consistency between OSM and wikipedia - well actually wikidata - so we can have the graphic material in one, and the abstract data such as population over time in the other. We have a substantial volume of data available now, and pulling it together so we only manually edit what actually needs editing make sense to me.