OpenStreetMap

boundary=landarea is "dead". there is no reason for that. and it is not used any more.

for island in the see, the coastline is the admin-boundary for all admin_levels > 4

please revert your changes otherwise i have to talk to the dwg.

walter

and please: you should discuss changes on admin boundaries before you change them.

No: the islands that were present are in false "motus" and not really the islands.
They are not even the adminsitrative boundaries (that were not tagged at all before, because the only thing that was present was the international boundary of France and there was nothing about communes, communes associées and atolls in those communes).
All those changes are reflecting the official administrative status as reported by ISPF (the official statistics institute in French Polynesia)
I did not suppress anything, I added many more precisions, you make false assumptions

Note: boundaries for landareas are not dead, especially not in France.
There are still lot of work to do in French Polynesia, but nothing was removed.
In a later update I'll take into account the "baselines" for communes, but for now the islands are the not the administrative "boundaries".
I've just kept the tag "boundary=land_area" for compatibility, but I know it is not necessary as there's also "land_area=administrative" which is more exact, but present too.
Please don't assume things that you don't know about France.

Also, your threat of dwg is unfair. the current boundaries of "islands" are very approximative (these are only "motus") and none of them are the "baseline" which is the adminstrative boundary for *local collectivities* (but not for the prefectoral administration of France which includes the territorial waters)
There was before this change absolutely no boundary defined at all for communes. I'm ADDING them

Why were over 4000 ways and 49000 nodes touched in an edit that supposedly only fixes a few boundaries? Was this a mistake?

it started locally (in the Kerguelen islands where most of the nodes and ways are located), then there were many affected dependant relations, I checked many of them and found some of them were broken locally and I fixed them, there was also several edit conflicts on them and to solve them I had to decipher them, and reorder them to make sure nothing was missing and they were still connected.
Thie main reson is that the international border of France covers a large area in the world.
This was not a mistake and it took about one week to solve all problems before uploading sometying that should have taken less than a few hours.

Note: this is discussed on the French OSM talk list.