[Talk-GB] Tagging historic surface mining/streamworks

[ael]

On Fri, Sep 03, 2021 at 03:20:51PM +0200, Michael Collinson wrote:
> 
> Personally, I'd be happy with historic=quarry. It may not look like a rock quarry, but then a lot of old quarries don't look like quarries either, it is the affect of time rather than the technique.

I am a little surprised at that. I think that you are the only native
English speaker who has accepted quarry here. In everyday speech, a
quarry implies something with at least one near vertical face which
is or was worked for, usually, rock. 

As you note, old quarries may have crumbled, eroded and become
overgrown, 

Drawing a precise technical distinction might be tricky in corner cases,
but I think duck-tagging should be the quideline here.

Also, we want a map, well renderings, which are useful to
non-specialists. Any ordinary UK person seeing all those spurious 
"quarries" on Bodmin Moor would just conclude that the map is
ridiculous and not trustworthy. Especially since they are close
to 3 real and significant quarries. Here I am mainly addressing that
original retagging, rather than your historic approach.

I am convinced that in ordinary UK English, surface_mining captures
these areas quite well, although obviously it includes quarries
if pushed hard. Which is what the non-native speakers seem to have done.

My real objection is that there is serious loss of information.
As with the hushes that were also retagged, we, as mappers, had 
captured distinctive features and retagging removed that information
and degraded the map.

As an example, look at imagery of the southern tip of 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/366882267
( to which I have just added landstate=disturbed as something of an
experiment ). I can't accept that it could be called a quarry in
any sensible sense.

That area is nearly flat, and the mounds and disturbances are all
less than a metre high from what I remember just now. It is incredibly
"distured" area with a very complex history being next to more modern
shafts and more. There was an attempt to reopen one of the adjacent
shafts during WW2 to mine Wolfram, but flooding halted the work.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

ael