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

[OSM Volunteer stevea]

The linguist in me feels compelled to be a bit pedantic:  terms like "plain language" and "human language" used to distinguish between data/code/machine kinds of "language," including what we mean by "tagging" or "codepoint" are, I believe, well-expressed with the (linguistic community) phrase "natural language."

Much of what OSM is going through with "park" is because:

1)  leisure=park wasn't clearly defined (this is essentially the most important lesson),
2)  "park" has wide variation in what is meant (I have noted a distinctly American English dialect usage that is much more inclusive than that how OSM defines "park" as in 1),
3)  the drift apart between less-precise (over 15 years of tagging) usage of leisure=park, more-precise definition of leisure=park (which we partly say "what we meant all along" but others disagree, as it was less-precisely defined) has become severe, brought into focus as we recently made more precise the definition of leisure=park.  (Ostensibly to mean "what we meant all along," but which appears to be a significant re-definition to many, especially in the USA, where American English is used and its word "park" shaped the lack of precision definition in our wiki for the first 15 years of OSM).

Well, about there, anyway.  I think most or even all of us know this, I wanted to state it as explicitly as I do here.  These are my opinions, though they rise from long-term observation.

SteveA