You think it's arrogant to not engage in a discussion? Do you have infinite time? Or did you take my characterisation of the state of suburbs as "idleness" personally?

Either way, your accusation of disrespect and arrogance, bundled with the mischaracterisation of my opinion, use of the word "assure", and random threat, is quite ironic.

RE Lonesome: it seems that it was closed because someone cited it with an article.

Actually, sorry, I forgot to mention that part of the reason I'm put off from engaging in discussions is that your note gives an example of such a discussion that took over a year to close.

I deduced based on the fact that Nominatim doesn't return town info in London and based on the usage info given here (place=suburb ; place=town) that suburbs in Greater London should be tagged "suburb" and not "town" without exception, and that the reason there were random exceptions was that nobody had bothered to enforce the change. There is not necessarily a problem in Nominatim.

I would consider the fact that "thousands if not millions of people have been able to use the data without changing it" to be idleness, rather than consensus, particularly in light of your sentence "For instance by changing these nodes you probably break the searches on Garmin devices which use the same data.", as no other reason is given for not enforcing the change.

The fact that the edits were reverted immediately rather than being discussed is reasonable to me.

Either way, I won't bother using Nominatim if it gives low-quality information and fixing it involves submitting dubious issue reports or opening discussions on the status of every "town" in London and on every obviously-fake suburb. I don't have the patience to engage in a discussion on the town/suburb convention and will leave my point here. Thanks for reading.

Hi, thanks for describing your policy.

I made the changes in order to make the map work with OSM's Nominatim service. This is an API that takes coordinates as input and returns addresses. Suburbs of London labelled as towns *do not get returned* by Nominatim, presumably because it trumps them with city = London. This means that a nearby suburb is given (e.g. Hanwell instead of Ealing), no info is given (Greenwich) or a non-suburb is given (Brook Green instead of Hammersmith). My changes relabelled towns as suburbs and, for a while, Nominatim was giving much more reliable info. Not anymore!

I did not believe (and still don't, really) that these decisions are based on consensus since there is no consistency between towns/suburbs and certain regions labelled as suburbs are obviously not suburbs ("West Kensington Park"?). This is what prompted me to make my bold edit. But do let me know where I can read discussions.

Anyway, please let me know how this problem shall be dealt with. I joined OSM in order to fix this problem with how Nominatim works in London, to improve the accuracy of locations returned by my geolocating bot.