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

[Bert -Araali- Van Opstal]

Sorry Brian, but I do think this is a fair assessment.

What do you call "burried". Our wiki is very open and accessible in my 
point of view to all "fork" highway tagging: see 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tagging 
<https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tagging> and specific for highway 
tagging 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Highway:International_equivalence 
<https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Highway:International_equivalence>. 
Also for the US.

I am not contesting that you made a big effort to contact local 
community pages, including the US, but that you were a bit too 
enthusiastic to consider it as a general or more general (because it 
could apply in USA and most of Europe).  Most of the world, 
unfortunately, still not most of the OSM community is outside of the US 
and Europe.

In your enthusiasm you considered this maybe as a general applicable 
variant, but seen the large number of variants that appear in this 
discussion in a very short time, seems to prove the contrary in my eyes.

Greetings,

Bert Araali

On 26/02/2021 22:44, Brian M. Sperlongano wrote:
>
>     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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