Follow the [tagging good practices][1] and in your case, the "[One feature, one OSM element][2]". Therefore, put the tag place either on a node or on the area, but not on both.
For a village or town, the "area" might be:<br> be:
- the settlement itself where most of the buildings are, the urbanized area. This can be tagged with "landuse=residential" on a single polygon as a starting point. Later, it can be more detailed and splitted split in smaller pieces (apart the residentials, you might have farms, shops, industries, offices, crafts, etc areas). But if you have a single polygon, you can put the tag "place=*" there. Or keep the place node and tag the polygon with the tag "place_name=*" (see [this wiki][3] or [that one][4]).<br>
one][4]).
- the administrative boundary which may include the countryside around the settlement. You can also put the tag "place*" on this polygon (or more commonly, on the [boundary/multipolygon relation][5]). But this is less usual as we can see in the statistics that [currently only 6% of the boundaries are combined with the "place" tag][6]. An alternative is to keep the place node indicating where the place "centre" is (more or less, the definition of the place centre beeing being sometimes subjective) and attach it to the [boundary relation with the role "admin_centre"][7].
[1]: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice
//wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice
[2]: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/One_feature,_one_OSM_element
//wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/One_feature,_one_OSM_element
[3]: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:place_name
//wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:place_name
[4]: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Faq#What_makes_a_road_belong_to_a_city.3F
//wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Faq#What_makes_a_road_belong_to_a_city.3F
[5]: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relation:boundary
//wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relation:boundary
[6]: http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/?key=boundary&value=administrative#combinations
//taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/?key=boundary&value=administrative#combinations
[7]: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relation:boundary//wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Relation:boundary