[Tagging] The endless debate about "landcover" as a top-level tag

[Kevin Kenny]

On Thu, Jun 7, 2018 at 12:41 PM, Mateusz Konieczny <matkoniecz at tutanota.com>
wrote:

> I responded to "what's wrong with getting rid of these bad choices?"
>
> I see nothing wrong with using landcover=trees.
>
> But in context of this discussion I understood "bad choices" as
> landuse=forest.
>
> BTW, I am happy to fix some broken tagging - for example I am regularly
> hunting down
> demolished=yes (for example on buildings), made/make multiple mechanical
> edits
> cleaning up tags (yes, it is approved by local community and follows
> mechanical edit policy).
>
> But deprecating landuse=forest of redefining lanes tag is not going to
> happen.
>
>
Could we compromise on 'discouraged for new data entry' and at leasthave
the discussion of semantically appropriate tagging? Would it be possible
that we could support all of the following?

(1) landuse=forestry - to describe the land use, since the existing tag
describes the land cover

(2) landcover=trees - to describe the land cover (and allow for describing
that land that has another use is treed)

(3) landuse=forest - a note on the Wiki that the tag actually describes
that the land is tree-covered, and that a preferable spelling might be
landcover=trees (if that is what is meant) or landuse=forestry (if the land
is actively managed as a producing forest)

This is not 'deprecating' landuse=forest - it's still there, it can be
there indefinitely, it can render correctly. It's adding tags in such a way
that a user who wishes to describe the land use (there's no correct tag for
it at present) or describe the landcover without introducing a conflicting
land use (as for a patch of forest on an industrial parcel) at least has
tagging available to do it. It's not proposing that mechanical edits would
be a good idea or that we need any kind of Draconian coordinating body for
tagging, it's just proposing an alternative spelling that associates with
the desired semantics.

(1) is the really important part - there is, at present, no accepted
tagging for that idea.
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