James Umbanhowar <jumba...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Just to throw another curveball in here, there is also
> leisure=nature_reserve which is frequently (occasionally?) used for the
> city/county parks that are less structured and used for hiking and
> nature appreciation.

Thanks, James.  Reiterating, when I say "Existing 4," (as "tags we use on 
park-like things"), I mean:

leisure=park
leisure=nature_reserve
boundary=national_park
boundary=protected_area

Number "4-1/2" (or a 5th) might be landuse=recreation_area, which sometimes, 
even according to its wiki, conflates with leisure=park.  But use 
landuse=recreation_area when appropriate, of course.

I hear (loud and clear) the unfortunate-ness of boundary=national_park.  I know 
an easy go-to fix might be "how about we Americans coin the boundary=state_park 
tag...".  Two things about that which I hope are enlightening.

1)  As states are as sovereign as the federal government (for purposes of 
saying "what a park is around here"), the tag boundary=national_park has rather 
widely been applied to state parks and state-park like lands.  (I know Kevin 
Kenny has made a good case for why he uses this tag on certain New York state 
"lands" of a certain sort.  And a lot of state parks in California and other 
states get this tag.

2)  Once we go down the road of state_park as a value on boundary, we'll begin 
to tag (if we already haven't, I could check taginfo) county_park, city_park, 
maybe even private_park and other oddities which "break" a strict hierarchy of 
government administration.  (My psuedo/proto-protosal of a park_level=* tag, 
with values that mimic admin_level goes here, but that's an aside).  We have 
sort of tried this with the park:type tag (noted in the Subject), and that has 
been so wide-open (since at least 2009) that it didn't even have a wiki page 
about it until I sketched in a loose one late last week.  (I'm dancing as fast 
as I can).  The park:type tag is a mess, and in my opinion should enter early 
stages of deprecation right now as I believe it is too free-form and confusing. 
 I mean, I'm all for coining tags and plastic values, but this one seems to 
have simply become overly messy.

Perhaps new tags (in addition to the Existing 4 or 5) are in order, so that we 
may better address the "unfortunateness" of boundary=national_park.  But it 
would have to be a quite-well-thought-out proposal, might NEED to include the 
concept of park_level (which can be supplemented by operator=* and/or owner=* 
tags), and should scale to the whole world of OSM, rather than be USA-specific. 
 I'm pretty sure, anyway.  Or maybe we don't need any new tags (maybe values?) 
and we simply need good "rules" (rough logical mappings, maybe tightened up 
over time, or state-by-state) to apply the Existing 4 or 5 that mappers in the 
USA agree are crystal-clear, if that's possible.

SteveA
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