Where to put 'place' nodes.

An interesting article can be seen at https://gizmodo.com/how-cartographers-for-the-u-s-military-inadvertently-c-1830758394 . It shows how such things as placing (say) a city or town node on someone’s house, could create serious problems for the residents.

OSM’s wiki already has advice to place city and town nodes on major landmarks or the like, and I’ve just added similar advice for country and state nodes.

My colleague has bought a piece of land for a cottage near the label of a district of Moscow Region on Yandex map.
So many times different cars and even trucks went there and search for a place to make U-turn because road ends there.
And long vehicles could make a turn on the narrow road only when its use colleague’s land. Or they have to call a tractor to move backward.
My colleague make a report to Yandex and they move the label to a forest near a highway.
I also check the label in OSM. It also was near the same place and I move it to the forest.
It was also important that the point should be near the good highway so trucks should have a good chance to make a U-turn

You are confusing things. The article mentions a default fallback IP geolocation that idiots presume is accurate to the street level.

This has nothing to do with how we place place=* nodes.

In my story navigation application return position of the label of district when search of a village in the district failed.
So drivers drive to that point

RicoElectrico - if you were referring to my first message, I wasn’t confusing things. We do provide a default position, and that is the country, state or city node, et.c., which could be used by someone that does not use the boundary information (if that is provided). It is therefore important to place it appropriately.

I wrote 2 diary entries about the position of the centre, one for Rome and one for Berlin:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/dieterdreist/diary/40727
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/dieterdreist/diary/40735
Maybe this is interesting in this context. While I believe there are good reasons for indicating a center for a settlement, I would question this practice for entities like countries, provinces, states and similar. A country has a capital (usually 1), and other administrative territorial entities also have admin centres, which can nowadays all be mapped within the boundary relation, no need for isolated nodes, they are legacy and will sooner or later disappear