I’m trying to figure out how I should tag the names on features which are referred to by multiple names by different sources. In my case of the town/village of Michigan (referred to as such from 1847-1848, until the name was changed to Lansing) was referred to as “Michigan Village” in this legislative index, and as “the town of ‘Michigan’” in the act which changed its name to that of Lansing, while being referred to as the “‘Village of Michigan’” in this book about Lansing.
Additionally, there is the aspect that Michigan is also the name of the state it lies within, and simply “Michigan” could be confused as simply being a label for the state if viewed on a map without a symbol or word differentiating it from being the same (and in the context that two labels for the State of Michigan already appear contemporaneously on the OHM website).
So I have two issues. What do I use as the tag for the place= key (town, village, or something else like hamlet) and what do I use for the name= key (“Michigan”, “T/town of Michigan”, “V/village of Michigan”, “Michigan Village”, or something else)?
In the 19th century, the designations village, town, and city were somewhat fluid in many states. Some of Ohio’s largest municipalities around that time were officially towns, whereas that designation has been abolished; nowadays municipalities of the same population would be cities. If general law changed, you might not easily uncover references to a specific municipality in relation to those changes.
Or could it be that “town” is just shorthand for “township”? At a glance, most of the instances of “town” in the 1848 legislative index seem to refer to what are currently either survey townships or civil townships (or charter townships), though there are also references to “townships” throughout these same laws. If the law did mean “township”, then this timeline would suggest that it was the township that was renamed from Michigan to Lansing, 11 years before the City of Lansing was incorporated. Until the city was incorporated, Michigan Lansing would’ve been both a township and an unincorporated place within it. Does that sound plausible?
This happens frequently enough that I’m personally not too concerned about it. New York also happens to have a town by the same name as the state. If necessary, we can find a way to better distinguish the two features in the stylesheet.
If sources inconsistently call the township “Michigan Village” and “Town of Michigan” and “Michigan Township” during the same time period, maybe the best option would be name=Michigan, relegating the qualified names to alt_name=* and official_name=*.
In principle, the place=* point should represent the populated place within the township, regardless of its incorporated status, and the place=* value should reflect its importance relative to other populated places. This is a quite complex and unsettled topic even in OpenStreetMap in the present day, let alone when considering changes over time.
I don’t have a good idea of what were considered Michigan’s major population centers in the mid-19th century, but these days it would be a pretty clear candidate for a place=city. Maybe it has always qualified as a place=city throughout its existence as a city, but if it was more of a place=town in its early years, then the boundary relation would still record the legal status as border_type=city. Before incorporation, the boundary simply wouldn’t exist, or it could be boundary=place at most.
It would seem by the establishment of Lansing township in the laws of 1842 that the township has always been called Lansing (since it was broken off from Allaieden township [now Alaiedon Township]) and this story from History of Ingham and Eaton Counties, Michigan by Samuel W. Durant located here at MIGenWeb seems to agree with that:
In December, 1841, Roswell EVERETT, Zalmon S. HOLMES, and myself [Henry H. NORTH] met at the house of my father, by appointment, and framed two petitions to the Legislature for the organization of two townships. But one name was suggested for the first, - that of lansing, my father saying he wanted it named after our old town of Lansing, in New York. For the second two names were proposed, - Delhi, by Roswell EVERETT, and Genoa, by myself, not knowing that there was a Genoa in Livingston County at that time.
So it would seem to me that was is referred to as Michigan is only the unincorporated place but not the township. Based on what I have seen, it seems that it was quite a small place at the time it was called Michigan (for less than a year from June 1847-April 1848), though I haven’t seen specific population figures. I would guess it would be considered a place=village. There is this quote from City in the Forest by Darling on page 33, “They had come to this ‘Village of Michigan’ … hoping to find things somewhat better. But this was a frontier town, and civilization hadn’t had time to arrive, as yet.” That makes me think a designation like place=town might be too great at this time, so probably place=village is appropriate.
I’ve uploaded a changeset with Michigan place node added, feel free to take a look if you feel inclined. I’ll try to go back and add sources for each of the alt names I listed. I also want to standardize the legislative sources I cited with the number and name of the legislation rather than generically citing the name as “Acts of the Michigan Legislature 18XX”.
One strategy I would consider is shifting some of this documentation workload to Wikidata where you can provide multiple values for the property “[name]”(name - Wikidata) or one of its more specific sub-properties to include the specific references that support the claim. The basic alternate label/alias attribute in WD can include all available labels in multiple languages as a convenience and finding aid. Of course, this leaves the issue in the OSM schema of how to improve discoverability when a feature is known by more than one name. To me, it would be nice if we could evolve to the same approach used in Wikidata/Wikibase where every concept/property/tag can have multiple values that are each treated as a unique assertion backed by one or more explicit references and any necessary qualifiers (e.g., indicating circumstances where a value is valid/invalid such as a start/end date).
I’ve daydreamed about something like this ever since I first joined OHM a couple years back. OHM seems like an excellent opportunity to rethink OSM decisions to some extent. The challenge is always that, software-wise, we operate as a very lightweight fork of OSM due to very lean developer resources. So far, we’ve tweaked the tagging conventions somewhat, such as to introduce subscripted sources, but have never touched the underlying data model in OSM XML, even for something as fundamental as start and end dates.
Just as Wikidata usually expects one of the competing claims to be “preferred”, we still need to pick a winner, so that renderers and geocoders can deterministically display a name that causes the least surprise. To the extent that there are contradictory claims to note, we can relegate them to subkeys or key variants such as alt_name=*. The only variant name key in OSM that doesn’t make so much sense here is old_name=*.
One of the tweaks we have made is to attach sources to individual tags, for example, alt_name:source=*, alt_name:source:2:date=*, etc. iD has basic support for these source subkeys (the @ button on each field). Logically, other qualifiers are possible, such as alt_name:note=*. However, we’ve moved away from the idea of qualifying tags by dates because it’s too difficult to implement even basic functionality using such tags.
Given our current data model, I agree that we should lean on Wikidata to more clearly express discrepancies in metadata, whereas Wikidata would naturally lean on us to express geometric discrepancies, which we’d model as separate features. I’ve often gotten to the point where I’ve gathered enough nuanced metadata about a feature that I feel an acute need to recreate it in Wikidata. Tools such as QLever enable data consumers to access the data regardless of where it’s stored.