[Tagging] Mapping deforestation wikipage

[Kevin Kenny]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2019 at 4:37 PM Mateusz Konieczny
<matkoniecz at tutanota.com> wrote:
> I would advise to tag just forest landcover is satellite images are unusable to tag
> other features properly and to not introduce incompatible tagging scheme just because
> you really want to vectorize this specific low quality dataset.

I think there is some grain of value here.  He has a use case where he
has valid but incomplete information: "in this polygon, I don't know
what the landcover is in sufficientdetail to tag it with the existing
OSM taxonomy, but it is definitely NOT forest." Otherwise, there's no
way to distinguish, "we haven't read and mapped the imagery yet" from
"we've mapped the imagery, and there's no forest here."

When I know something about a piece of ground, I think it's reasonable
for me to want to tag what I know, without needing to do further
investigation. That's why, for instance, I object to distinguishing
power=line from power=minor_line by voltage - I may have no way of
determining that in the field, but the power line is still a landmark,
and still deserves to be mapped.

I'm not demanding that for the specific use case of 'NOT forest', that
we have to have a broadly accepted tag, but I think that it may well
be a valid reason to invoke "Any tags you like"
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Any_tags_you_like. It's really
offensive to tell mappers that they can't map features because we
can't figure out how to tag them, and in many cases it comes across as
cultural insensitivity: "the data model is fine. Fix your country."