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.