[Talk-us] Tagging National Forests

[OSM Volunteer stevea]

Mike Thompson writes:
> 1) I don't know how anyone would able to tell this from simple on the ground observation.


Granted:  from an on-the-ground observation, a landuse=forest might look very much like a natural=wood.  However, if you saw that part of the area had some stumps, you could safely conclude it is not natural=wood (unless there was "illegal logging” going on, and that DOES happen) but rather that it is landuse=forest.  THEN, there is where you know for a fact (from facts not on-the-ground, but perhaps from ownership data, signage like “Welcome to Sierra National Forest” or other sources) that THIS IS a real, live forest, in the sense OSM intends to mean here (landuse=forest implies timber harvesting now or at some point in the future).

> 2) While the English word "natural" might suggest this, we use "natural" for other things that man has a hand in creating or modifying, e.g. natural=water for a man made reservoir.


Again, I’ll grant you this, but it only shows that OSM’s tagging is not always internally consistent.  I can live with that.  What is required (and “more clear" in the case of natural=water) is the understanding that consensus has emerged for natural=water:  this gets tagged on bodies of water which are both natural and man-made, and that’s OK, and we don’t lose sleep over it or look for more consistency.  It’s like an exception to a rule of grammar:  you just learn it, and say “shucks” that there are such things as grammatical exceptions.

I’m doing my very best to listen, and it seems many others are, too.  Listening is the heart of building consensus.  Let us not also become entrenched in minor exceptions or established conventions adding further confusion when identifying them as such actually can help us achieve more clarity.

SteveA
California
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