[Tagging] Use of highway=track vs highway=service cemeteries, parks, allotment gardens, golf courses, and recreation areas

[Brian M. Sperlongano]

>
> In my opinion the US group, requesting for the amendment and clarification
> in the general description look at it from a too narrow local perspective.
> No where does it explicitly say that a track cannot be used for paved
> roads, nowhere does it say that highway=service roads should be paved.
> That was like this even before we had the surface=* tag.
>
This is not a fair assessment.

I started the initial discussion on this over in talk-us after it became
apparent from talking with other US mappers that the wiki did not reflect
actual US usage.  The goal of the wiki is to describe how tags are actually
being applied (descriptive approach), and, where it exists, document
community consensus on prescriptive recommendations to mappers on how
tagging should be applied.

At the time I believed that the US approach was unique among the world, and
the perpetuated result of a 2007 road network import that assigned
highway=track to certain categories of roads.  So the goal was simply to
document that this differing usage existed, and certainly not to change (or
"amend") the definition to impose one regional interpretation on the
world.  But similarly, it would be intolerable for an entire country's
usage to be buried in such a way that the main global page would be at odds
with that national usage.

Through this community dialogue (both here, on talk-us, and in predecessor
local community conversations), and through a series of constructive wiki
edits, I believe we are now much closer to representing, in that wiki page,
how this tag is being used -- at least as it applies to North America and
Europe.  So the goal here is not to narrow the definitions and
descriptions, but rather to have them accurately describe global tagging.
I would strongly be in favor of additional text, clarification, and/or
prominently placed links, to ensure that the page is also accurately
reflecting usage in Africa (or any other region), and to not bury that
information on an obscure regional-specific page, unless all regional
interpretations are similarly forked off.

If we find that the usage worldwide is too different from place to place,
it could also be appropriate to say something more generic like "this is
the lowest classification of road, and its exact usage varies by region
(list of links)".  This is the approach that was taken for highway=trunk,
correctly recognizing that a trunk road in Uganda would have very different
observable characteristics from a trunk road in Germany.
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