User blog:Phlox/Do we really need place hierarchical classification in articles?

Traditional schemes like microformats force the user to know location hierachies. A city must use the locality field, a landmark must use the extended address field, and so on. Right now, the contributor must understand a location hierarchy (see below). This is usually no problem for locations in the person's country, but is not a safe assumption for different time periods or for different locales. I just wonder if this cognitive load is necessary. *Country   **Subdivision1 (constituent country in UK, oblast in Russia, and so on)  ***County (there is no classification for Regions of England, such as South West England which is both a geographic region and a governmental unit- an EU parliament consituency.)  ***Locality - can be problematic for large cities, eg London- Greater London occupies the status of a county containing the city of Westminster, but the City of London proper does not, and is actually a fairly small area that comprises the historic core of London. Russia has the concept of Federal cities, so for example St Petersburg and Moscow are technically subdivision1's not localities. ****Street address- rather than encumbering Forms with all variations of location types, it was decided to simply overload street address so that it could be used as a catchall for locations smaller than a city, and landmarks, such as city squares, neighborhoods, mountains, lakes, building (Empire state building, St. Mark's cathedral). However, no matter how well documented, it is non intuitive that Mt. Everest would be a street-address. There is no point in making the user jump through hoops to specify locations if it delivers them no practical benefit. I just wonder if there aren't other ways to deliver these practical benefits. After all, we are asking them to use disambiguated place names. Why should the user have to know what county a particular village in England is located in? The main purpose for these hierarchies is for search scoping- eg: show me all the births for that period in a wider area. These searches may be actual queries, but more likely would be categorizations like Concept:Births in Texas in the 1840s. Maybe SMW efficiency issues still would force us to encode the Is-part-of hierarchy must be persistently in records for each persion. But can't we generate these values via bot run? Why not just ask the user to specify place1, place2, place3 and so on, and all they need concern themselves with is that the order is the containment order, just like the order of place names on an envelope. It is certainly more intuitive. I just wonder if it could be pulled off in the forms and queries so that this looseness would not come back to haunt us. ~