I just ran across a changeset that removed addr:city from a bunch of POIs, on the grounds that it was “redundant with boundary data.” Some of these POIs had a Canadian postcode that would indeed imply city, but others had no postcode. The city could of course be calculated by the POI’s presence inside the city relation, but I hadn’t seen this as a rationale to remove information before.
Would people consider this valid? By extension, should I stop documenting the city when I create a POI; is it considered noise?
It’s not redundant to boundary data. There are many places where postal addresses don’t use the same place names as the administrative boundaries. Even if this were not so, the point of addr tags is to make it possible to search for full addresses.
Based on what you told us I am pretty sure that person was wrong, frankly bordering on vandalism.