Hello all, I was reminded of this diary entry by weeklyOSM https://weeklyosm.eu/archives/14940 after the discussion on talk-ca https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-ca/2021-October/010127.html

I find the objections raised by commenters here and in the talk-ca thread interesting.

Warning, example relation links posted here are for huge relations that might seriously slow your browser.

The maintainability and “cumbersomeness” hasn’t stopped OSM from adding any other amount of detail. I could point to examples like PTv2 relations for long-distance buses such as https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/10715333 spanning hundreds of kilometres and thousands of OSM ways. This is a tooling and database issue and as far as I know OSM’s approach has always been to make the database as good as possible and not worry about storage or RAM.

Lack of community consensus hasn’t stopped relations for the Alps https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/2698607 (did you know Vienna is in the Alps?), for the Berliner Urstromtal https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/2218270 (with fuzzy borders drawn as random guesswork long straight lines), or indeed if we wish for maritime examples, for the Pomeranian Bay (https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/9037646) which even has that imaginary straight line “separating” it from the main sea.

I gave two of these examples in a response to woodpeck/Frederik Ramm on talk-ca, unfortunately to no response.

Now, you can say that there is no consensus that adding these examples in Europe was a good idea. But evidently there is also no consensus that adding these is a bad idea and that they should be deleted. Until these prominent examples in Europe are addressed in some way, trying to claim “no consensus” for the same kind of edits in Canada feels more than a little like pulling up the drawbridge once you’re in.

I must say that encoding Hans Island as “administered” by Denmark is going to be fairly amusing if anyone ends up there expecting any administrative infrastructure.

Hi GPIOIPG, I saw links to this post in weeklyOSM. Maybe you’ll find it interesting or helpful: About a year ago I looked at similar issue for Vancouver rapid transit. When I looked at rapid transit elsewhere in U.S. and Canada, I saw unfortunately little consistency - some cities tend to use “Station” suffix, others don’t. Summary here: https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-ca/2017-November/008188.html