I too discourage the use of placeholders for hamlets and villages. It’s very tempting to use such tricks to force POIs to show up on our GPS units and much of this discussion as well as others I’m involved in have to do with the imperfect rendering of POIs in the Garmin downloaded maps we obtain from Lambertus. My conversation with EndlessRoundabout concerning stupas being rendered as radio towers is one several that spring from this issue.
http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=23639
One of OSM’s golden rules is “do not tag for the renderer” but we see this being done often. I think the best approach would be to create a Thailand style sheet that would help Thailand mappers but not compromise or influence the basic rules of OSM. Were the learning curve not so steep for learning how to modify styles and TYP files I would try it myself.
If this seems a workable approach, is anybody willing to attempt this. Stephan, I know you have considerable experience here. What do you think?