[Talk-us-massachusetts] intro and intent

[hobbit at techno-fandom.org]

Well, this has gotten interesting already, with a fairly brisk offlist
conversation with Greg T.  I don't really consider myself an experienced
mapper and wouldn't know how to do a GIS import or the like if my life
depended on it, but have made my tiny share of trail fixups in our local
woods.  This has mostly to do with "wiki/Forest approach 6" which seems to
be the only way I've discerned to turn my beloved hiking parks back to the
correct color.  Altruism in this area and/or poorly chosen changes to Carto
and others had been slowly eroding the easily-spottable green areas that
defined these, which really bugs me and folks I hang out with.

The battle for altruism was lost back in 2018, from what I read on the
"tagging" email archives.  What a mess.  But we're stuck with the non-
standardized fallout from that.

For starters, let me simply forward the direct email I sent to Tom Parent
below.  We had discussed a little of this in the past, which I'd almost
forgotten about, so I sent a very late followup to that.  I guess DMs on
OSM itself aren't that useful as communication..

Let it be clear that I am not tweaking for just one renderer or personal
satisfaction here; people are asking *me* why the parks aren't green.  In the
past I used to tell people wanting to find hikes to "go to openstreetmap.org,
zoom in on our area, and look for the green bits".  That started to become
less true over time, and I think I finally know why.



  ## ===  Previous msg to TomPar  === ##

Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2022 12:18:19 -0500
Subject: more on rendering...

Hiya, I'm sort of revisiting the "landcover" thing in OSM and almost forgot
that we'd conversed in the past.  I also did a bunch of reading in the
meantime, trying to sort out the chaos you referenced, and my wiki post

     https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/84812/

got a couple of answers/comments that only confused me a bit more.  As you
pointed out, there's no real "standard" and the babble of local dialects and
conflicting opinions over years makes the whole thing a real CF where it's
amazing that it works at all.

But it seemed to me that some combination of "landuse=forest" and/or
"natural=wood" was about the only way to reliably "green up" the woods like
I really preferred, because having the parks render the same pale background
just makes it that much harder to find them on a big map overview.  [Most of
them already have "boundary=protected_area".]  I took the common-denominator
examples from other properties that already looked "right" in my eye, such
as the relevant boundaries for the Fells, always looking for any hint of
consistency.  Having lost track of our previous conversation I started adding
those two tags to more of the stuff up my way, north of Boston, and IMHO the
result looks *so* much better than the "green boundary only" protected_area
only method.  For weirdly complex areas such as, say, Boxford State Forest,
I figured out how to create a relation and apply the tags to *that*, which
worked nicely without messing with any of the existing parcels.

Then I ran into your comment on

     https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/29868398

and realized that we were working at cross-purposes.  I still don't understand
what the intent is here, as it seems fairly true that any *smaller* enclosed
area with different tags will render its own way "on top of" a larger one,
thus not disturbing ponds, meadows, wetlands, etc within a forest in any
visibility-impairing way.  That seems true in various different renderers,
including the "OSM default" and Mapnik on my Androids as well as various
layers on the website.  The only time a "inner cutout" seems needed at that
level is to go around things that will only render in the background color,
like a house property that isn't technically part of the park.  I do see all
the work people have put in trying to "carve out" every possible little other
feature within larger park boundaries, that just seems nuts when it's not
actually needed *and* the feature is still within the property.

Have you looked at Rhode Island recently?  "Zelonewolf" seems to have turned
almost the entire state woods-green, and in oddball little chunks all over
the place.  That is potentially misleading in the way referenced by your email
comment about "the heavily wooded Northeast", but I think someone looking
at the map would generally understand that and I really feel like offsetting
the actual woodland parks in an obvious way is better than what some others
have been asserting.  There's also a big roughly circular area in NH that is
"much more green" than the rest, without much regard for what's in it, and
when I go to zoom in on, say, Pawtuckaway, that's just confusing.  So I'd
love to straighten some of this out, but without stomping on the work of
others without discussion.

I tried to reach both you and Zelonewolf on OSM itself, but that seems to
be a fail so far.  Another thing that is clearly true is that the OSM
community has way too many *avenues* of communication, without any one being
the clear preference, and that always makes for a mess.  It's like the event
planning organizations I work with -- at least they know that the least
common denominator is always email, but they also tend to get exclusionist
about their own preferred channels like Slack or a wiki or whatever.

In the meantime, I'm going to try and wade through the talk-us-massachusetts
list archives and catch up on *that* discussion if any.  Maybe I should join
it, where it looks like I'd be able to talk with the whole bunch of ya!  I've
messaged with Alan Bragg before too..

_H*