I’ve been working for a while on reviewing and editing the “place” tag in Thailand to match standards at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Thailand#Administrative_levels , then I think I encountered some problem. So, I suggest the standards be revised, as follows:
1) Remove “place=village” tag from subdistrict administrative organization (SAO - o bo to) because, first, meaning of “village” in https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:place%3Dvillage is “A smaller distinct settlement, smaller than a town” that is quite not match the condition of SAO, which is a group of many settlement (muban) outside urban area. Each muban is mostly the same in size so the obvious center of SAO (to place node) is can’t be identified, especially for the SAO that covered more than one adjacent tambon.
Second, since SAO is divided as muban and since we tagged all muban with “place=hamlet”, so it means “hamlet” is part of “village” that sounds strange. The meaning of “hamlet” in https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:place%3Dhamlet is “isolated settlement” which is clear that hamlet and village is a different place, not a subarea of each other.
Lastly, how can we tag the SAO?, I suggest to tag the SAO only as an area with “admin_level=7” as in current standards, since SAO is kind of “administrative” terms, not “settlement”, in https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:place the “administrative” and “settlement” tag has been separated obviously. And if we want the SAO name to be shown in the map we should focus on editing the style of the renderer, not the map, so it won’t be “tagging for renderer” rule of thumb.
2) If the “village” tag is idle, we should use it for township municipality (thetsaban tambon) because, now, we use “place=town” for both thetsaban tambon and thetsaban mueang, so the distinction is can’t be identified. Since Thailand has 32 thetsaban nakhon, 187 thetsaban mueang, and 2236 thetsaban tambon, if we tag under the current rule, Thailand in OSM would be consist of 32 city and 2423 town which look a little bit strange on the map. For a quite extreme example, “Thetsaban Tambon Ruam Chit” (with population of 3,415) and “Thetsaban Mueang Surin” (with population of 39,025) would look the same on the map.
Notwithstanding, there is another choice to solve this problem, since neighboring country around Thailand has many more “city” than Thailand on OSM, despite their population is less, we maybe choose to keep “town” for thetsaban tambon, but upgrade thetsaban mueang to “city” instead, or, to meet halfway, we can create new criteria such as “thetsaban mueang with more than 20,000 people”, or another choice, to be tagged as “city”. However, I’d rather suggest using “village” for thetsaban tambon is to make things most clear.
Wish my suggestion is helpful.
PS. I think (1) is a more important issue than (2)