[Tagging] Feature Proposal - Voting - boundary=aboriginal_lands

[Doug Hembry]

This is a bad proposal. We should stick with the boundary=protected_area 
tag family. As a whole, it's a successful attempt to bring some rational 
organization to what will over time (or to some extent already has) 
otherwise develop into a hodge-podge of top level boundary types: 
boundary=national park, =county park, =city park, State Ecological 
Reserve, Wild, Scenic & Recreation River (USFS), EPA Superfund site, 
water_shed area, Open_Space, recreation_area,  Nature Conservancy Fee 
Land, and, of course, now:  =aboriginal_lands. There are hundreds of 
them, and they vary from country to country. What binds them together is 
that they all designate some purpose and level of control over general 
"outsider" activities in an area. And capturing such information in OSM 
is significant - particularly in countries with large areas of 
non-urban  lands plus high levels of outdoor activity.
Someone has already done the work of mapping different countrys' titles 
into the formal IUCN categories, and I fail to see how much more 
difficult it is to tag "boundary=protected area" and "protect_class=24" 
than "boundary=aboriginal_lands". And no-one has yet pointed out that 
the protect_title=* tag allows (actually recommends) a local string 
description to be added for the area (ie, protect_title=Aboriginal Lands)
Apparently a lot of mappers seem to agree because there are already over 
600 uses of protect_class=24, versus just over 200 of 
boundary=aboriginal_lands, mostly, it seems in the north-east and 
north-west of the US (?)
Moreover, if an aboriginal_lands area should also be considered an 
administrative unit in its own right, then there's nothing wrong with 
two coincident boundary definitions - one describing it as a protected 
area and a second describing the administrative boundary, is there?
To extrapolate a little, personally I think it's very unfortunate that 
boundary=protected_area still is is not better supported in OSM. There 
are already 73,000 uses, worldwide. We badly need the tag to at least be 
rendered in carto, ideally with differentiation based on class and the 
access=* tag. Certainly it is unproductive to try to erode it's use by 
introducing new arbitrary top-level "convenience" tags like 
boundary=aboriginal_lands. I'll be voting against.