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?
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Keeping it as a source of ground truth would be nice from a development standpoint. Automated testing could then check whether over 5% (or whatever the average error is) of the automatically generated city data differs from the user submitted ones and warn you that you fucked up the auto generation.
In the US I think anything more than ZIP+4 is redundant.
addr:city is very important and I advice to always add it to anything which has a address.
When somebody deletes this, I would count it as vandalism and revert the deletions.
My reasoning: The OSM project and community have not implemented, documented or defined such calculations yet. My mind could be changed when it’s in place on osm.org and the logic available under a free license.
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.
@pootriarch
I generally consider it poor form to remove good data even if it isn’t strictly necessary.The necessity of the addr:city tag depends on the area. In some places it’s strictly according to a boundary that exists in OSM. In others the boundary data is either missing or doesn’t always align with the “postal town” according to the mail carrier so it’s good to include it.
