[Talk-us] Parks in the USA, leisure=park, park:type

[OSM Volunteer stevea]

 Doug Peterson <dougpeterson at dpeters2.dyndns.org> wrote (about "Parks in the USA..."):
> It is just that there is so much variety to deal with.

I agree, it proves frustrating from an OSM perspective.  I believe partly what happened is OSM started in the UK, where British English is spoken and "typically British" concepts entered the map with tags thusly derived, like leisure=park.  However and simultaneously, the well established American English sense of "park" ("a large area of land kept in its natural state for recreational use," my dictionary precedes that with "US") heavily affects how OSM USA contributors tag leisure=park.  This divergence from its OSM semantic (a British English idea of "smaller, urban, human-sculpted...) into US usage has gotten wider for many years.

BTW, this is partly a flame war I have been having for a week or two with another California user (starting with a question he asked on the leisure=park Talk page) and now seems to be improving in its tone and sanity (call it now "only" a brush fire).

What seems to be "shaking out" is that we US park-tagging contributors might think twice before NEWLY tagging leisure=park, though now there are a LOT of those in our map which likely should not be leisure=park, what many say is correct tagging.  So we have plenty of legacy tagging of USA parks which could benefit from examination and considering "Did this protected_area / national_park / nature_reserve / wide-open somewhat-natural recreation place get tagged leisure=park because of how Americans call LOTS of things parks, which isn't really how leisure=park is meant to be used?  Or is the leisure=park tag OK here, though many would say it's being stretched too far to correctly apply?  Many county parks are like this, though as Doug says, "there is so much variety" — yes, as many other "things" are in that bucket, too.

Greg Troxel <gdt at lexort.com> wrote (about "Parks in the USA..."):
> I don't understand this.

about my
>> I can see tag leisure=park persisting on a lot of county_parks for
>> some time (forever?), yet it seems OSM's worldwide view of "park"
>> excludes them (and we tag boundary=national_park on state and national
>> parks).

What I meant is partly what I say above to Doug:  that there is a lot of legacy leisure=park tagging in our map in the USA which persists, may for some time (by sheer vastness of number), and even when each and every questionable "park" is addressed by careful mappers who wish to do the right thing, there appears now to be a wide gulf between when the tag is seen to be appropriate, vs. inappropriate:  I circle back again to Doug's "there is so much variety to deal with."  There IS muddiness of how Americans use "park" to mean so much (and governments, via "Parks Departments" contribute), while our wiki definitions endeavor to be laser-focused.  I seek clarity, and slowly we appear to be getting there.  This won't get fixed overnight or soon, though, that is obvious, although I do believe that longer-term, things will heal towards better, more consistent tagging.

SteveA