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I may be the only one here, but I really think the entire treatment of either "forest" or "wood" on OSM needs to change. People have been drawing in any and every little half-acre patch of trees and labelling it "forest" or "wood", which is of no benefit to anyone using the maps and clutters them up to the point of being unreadable. What's more, these distinctions are unstable; patches of trees are being bulldozed all the time, and areas that were cleared in the past get overgrown with trees almost as fast. The map cannot possibly keep up with this, which means many of the forest parcels shown at any given time are incorrect or unreliable anyway.

IMHO, the attribute "Forest" should ONLY be applied to a NAMED forest, like the Appalachicola National Forest. All these little patches in people's back yards should be deleted; they are pointless and confusing.

And, frankly, the same goes for "farm". Such distinctions are not helpful unless it's a farm that's open to the public.

The state of Georgia is absolutely covered with these patches, which I refer to as Georgia's camo paint job -- because that's what it looks like. They are wholly pointless; a quick view of the satellite images shows they're laid out at random with no correlation to the ground cover whatsoever. I've been deleting these things for months, but it'd take years to clear up the whole state manually. And occasionally I wander into an area where someone has been drawing them in correctly -- they actually do correlate with reality on the ground -- but it still results in a cluttered mess. We need to come to an agreement that "wood", "forest", and "farm" only apply to named entities of interest to map users.

asked 13 Feb '16, 11:19

Kirbert's gravatar image

Kirbert
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accept rate: 0%

closed 13 Feb '16, 11:42

SomeoneElse's gravatar image

SomeoneElse ♦
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2

The format of this help site is geared around a question and answer format, it doesn't really work for "we should do X instead of Y - discuss" topics.

I'd suggest that the tagging list might be the best place for the discussion https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging - a search of the archives there shows plenty of previous discussion about forest, for example:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=forest+site:https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/&client=seamonkey-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:unofficial&gbv=1&sei=fRW_Vu7BAYTyUuGfntgH

The "how much we should map" question is a different one (only farms open to the public?) - maybe the https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk or https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us lists might be the more appropriate ones there.

(13 Feb '16, 11:40) SomeoneElse ♦

The question has been closed for the following reason "Not a question - comment added suggesting places better suited to the discussion that would ensue." by SomeoneElse 13 Feb '16, 11:42

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question asked: 13 Feb '16, 11:19

question was seen: 1,460 times

last updated: 13 Feb '16, 11:42

NOTICE: help.openstreetmap.org is no longer in use from 1st March 2024. Please use the OpenStreetMap Community Forum