OpenStreetMap: Admin_level for All Countries

For Myanmar, having "De facto independent areas (e.g. Wa state)" at admin_level=3 is wildly ambitious, since not only are these boundaries constantly shifting slightly due to the ongoing civil war, the actors involved don't even necessarily have the state capacity to accurately demarcate their own territorial claims.

The Wa State in particular appears to have undergone some "boundary fixing" a few weeks ago https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/9399863 but whether it now accurately reflects realities on the ground is anyone's guess. I'm inclined to believe the Wikimedia map https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Myanmar_civil_war.sv... showing Tangyan in Wa State territory is more up-to-date, unless they withdrew for some reason without it making the news. (The most recent I could find is this article from March where they were mining quartz in the area: https://english.shannews.org/archives/29385 )

OSM is a truly incredible resource. It's often lightyears ahead of proprietary maps in terms of feature accuracy. Often far behind in terms of points-of-interest.

It powers painless adding of maps to so many products, painless offline data analytics and joins (I built https://wildpocket.com/ by joining OSM to iNaturalist data).

Truly incredible and under appreciated by general public. I love street complete, it opens up OSM to so many beginners with the simple UX. Think there's a big markets for "beginner-friendly" OSM work - I've prototyped https://mapmender.com/ to help map the "last mile" routes for emergency response that are inherently hard to keep updated

> In some cases borders may overlap without making it an incorrect tagging. It may be result of agreement between countries to administer area together or to mark areas not controlled by any country, with both claiming it.

Fun fact: when you think of boundary disputes, two things tend to be assumed. One, this only happens in 'certain' countries. Two, this always means more than one country claims the same piece of land.

As for one: even the Netherlands and Germany claim the same bit of sea. Boundary status: unresolved (https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/19478817#map=12/53.56...), but don't worry, we're friends and allies these days.

As for two: because of complex reasons to with their eventual bullshit bargaining position, there are several slivers of land wedged between the respectively claimed borders of Serbia and Croatia which belong to… nobody¹ (https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/19478817). Although the local Serbian border patrols will gladly point their rifles in your general direction to point out that this does not, in fact, mean you get to be there as far as they're concerned.

1: Head-line grabbing claims by assorted dreamers notwithstanding; hence Verdis.

I had just watched a fantastic video about this very topic as it applies to the US https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5JbDuf--ng

Nice to see someone is keeping track of all of this in a logical way for all countries.

> Note: It has been decided not to add administrative boundaries of [super-national administrations] in OpenStreetMap. So please don't use admin_level=1.

Damn, I was hoping to see groups of countries (admin_level=1), and then groups of planets (admin_level=0), and then groups of stars (admin_level=-1), and then groups of galaxies (admin_level=-2). L. Ron Hubbard has surely established governments at all of these levels!

I started to contribute a lot to Openstreetmap since someone submitted the StreetComplete app a while ago !

It's amazing that something like this exists.

TIL of 'townland' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Townland - a subdivision mostly in Ireland and Scotland. (While I looked up UK)

Speaking of which, something odd seems to be happening in Peru ocean limits https://osm.org/go/NSkYk-

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