Make place=locality label to be less strong

[MartinZdila]

place=locality is rendered too strong considering its meaning. At http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/49.1133/19.7303 you can see how various localities makes villages hard to recognise. Please make it to render less strong, eg. by making font smaller and more fade.

[matthijsmelissen]

Just curious: do people actually use these locality names when navigating or describing where they live, or are they just names of random fields nobody cares about?

[MartinZdila]

I think they are mostly very local names not used for any navigation.

[daganzdaanda]

I agree about making the label smaller. Maybe it should only show up on z15?

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Locality says: "The place=locality tag can be used to name unpopulated place which is not associated with any extant feature to which such a tag could be associated."
So in theory, it need not be very "local", any unpopulated place that has a name could be a "locality". But the wiki also says place=locality is a last resort if there is no physical feature that could get a "name".

[matthijsmelissen]

I noticed many mappers use the locality tag because named landuse currently doesn't display until high zoomlevels. Mappers sometimes even duplicate a name in both a locality and landuse tag. In #941, labels of large landuse will be displayed more prominently, so maybe that will allow us to drop some locality tags.

[imagico]

Please do not see this only from the viewpoint of densely populated areas - as has been said place=locality is intended to unpopulated places, especially in rural areas where it does not usually interfere with names of populated places. Of course the tag is frequently abused just to place a label but features rightfully tagged place=locality are frequently important for orientation - local people often use such names when you ask for directions.

[MartinZdila]

Localities shown in my example are in Slovakia and are taken from Slovak cadastre. Many of them are known only to inhabitants of the nearby villages or cities (some even only by eldery residents) but some are known to wider public. They mostly refer to places without any physical feature, just for wat place=locality is for.

[dieterdreist]

2014-09-14 20:13 GMT+02:00 imagico notifications@github.com:

Please do not see this only from the viewpoint of densely populated areas -

+1, as often there is a conflict between different contexts: in areas with
high feature density you might not want these to show up early, but in low
density areas it will mostly be desirable to have them shown at an early
stage.

[Rovastar]

I don't think we are just seeing this from a densely populated area.
The OSM definition of locality is a relatively tiny area.
Z14 shows massively zoomed out area. It doesn't make sense to display locality at that zoom.
Also if it is abused we want to encourage less abuse so displaying this at Z15 would make sense there too.
We will always have the conflict between high and low density area and what to display. There is no way around this.

[dieterdreist]

2014-09-15 15:52 GMT+02:00 Rovastar notifications@github.com:

The OSM definition of locality is a relatively tiny area.

this is really not stated anywhere (there is no size requirement at all).

location is actually a kind of placeholder key for any kind of uninhabited
place for which there hasn't yet been invented/defined a more specific tag
describing its typology class. It is used for field names, but also for
groups of fields / cadastral entities of different sizes (and sometimes not
in effect any more for cadastral purposes, but still alive as toponyms).

[Rovastar]

By that definition then it should be rendered even less. It is more meaningless and less important.
Given that the lower the zoom level the more "important", "prominent", "noticeable", feature should be shown, etc
Do you have any examples of (correctly tagged) locality that are important enough to be shown at Z14? what about Z13?

One of the biggest issues with any changes to the carto style is that some of these were ill defined to begin with or designed in a time when the tags had different meaning and the map was less complete (the map was very different in 2008 to what is is now) but people have got used to them and any change is met with complaints. Sure we need to think about these things and discuss them, I am all for that but we need some examples to defend this case.

[imagico]

To give some examples of what would probably be correctly mapped as place=locality and is of relatively large extent and suitable for display at relatively coarse scales:

Around here in the Black Forest there are many places, often with names ending on 'Wasen' or 'Boden' where the name applies to an area of a few hundred meters to a few kilometers in size, usually not precisely outlined. These are rarely actually mapped as place=locality, usually the name is (incorrectly) found on POIs like:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/771186785#map=14/47.8860/7.9995
http://www.openstreetmap.org/node/540203083#map=15/47.9546/7.8849

In more remote regions you can also find much larger features, for example this area of about 6 km size on Devon Island:

http://mc.bbbike.org/mc/?lon=-84.57558&lat=75.67268&zoom=11&num=2&mt0=bing-satellite&mt1=mapnik

is called Truelove lowland - to me place=locality would seem the most fitting tag unless you want to invent something ill-defined like place=lowland. Similarly this area:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=8/82.701/-21.053

of about 20km size is called Herlufsholm Strand - the name 'Strand' means beach but this is not a beach by the meaning of natural=beach but a stretch of low lying coastal land that has been given a name.

[matthijsmelissen]

this is really not stated anywhere (there is no size requirement at all).

I spotted a new lower bound: here someone used place=locality for the different scenes inside a dark ride inside a theme park...

[matthijsmelissen]

The changes in #1210 slightly improved the situation.