Tag:landuse=wood
 landuse = wood
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Using this tag is discouraged, use natural=wood or landuse=forest instead. 
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| Group: Landuse |
| Used on these elements |
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| Wikidata |
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| Status: deprecated |
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This feature has been labeled as deprecated. The recommended replacement is: tag:natural=wood or tag:landuse=forest. |
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This tag is commonly used by mistake in place of natural=wood or landuse=forest |
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Commonly used by mistake
The tag landuse=wood is a curious hybrid between natural=wood and landuse=forest. This hybrid tag has existed in the database in fairly large numbers for a long time due to people using it by mistake when intending one or the other of those tags. As you can imagine, it's an easy mistake to make, and quite a few people have tagged quite a few patches of trees with this tag.
Let's remind ourselves of how the most widely used tags are defined:
- landuse=forest - Managed forest or woodland plantation. Wooded area maintained by human to obtain forest products. Commonly used tag in case of land primarily managed for timber production
- natural=wood - (a 'forest' or 'wood') not managed for economic purposes. Commonly used tag in case of primary forest (e.g. tropical forests, taiga)
But we need another tag for...
The above definitions present a few problems (like how to tell the difference between the two) but whether you like this classification or not, please bear in mind that these two tags have been used widely since 2004. That doesn't mean that this old tagging scheme can never change, but it does mean that any proposed change should be well thought out. Some existing proposals along these lines:
Please feel free to join in with those discussions or propose different tags. One tagging idea which has never actually been proposed or discussed (at least not within the wiki anywhere), is adding a tag landuse=wood
But landuse=wood was on Map Features!
Yes. Somebody, for reasons which are not clear, decided to create a page documenting landuse=wood here as if it was a proper tag. Obviously this tag appeared immediately to have significant acceptance, via database usage stats. The tag was listed on Map Features and even added to renderings rules.
A definition was invented "Managed or preserved woodland ... normally smaller and not actively or regularly forested". In other words something in between landuse=forest and natural=wood. This may appear to be a useful classification, but adding an additional top-level tag with words jumbled in a different order is (it can certainly be argued) a bad idea. In any case it should have been discussed somewhere.
Sadly it remained listed on Map Features for some time and so some uses within the database will have been intentional, and some mappers may still believe this to be a "valid" tag. Nevertheless the fact remains that this tag was originally only a "mistake" tag, and any attempt to introduce it as an accepted tag should have been discussed
But there's no such thing as an "invalid" or "deprecated" tag
Maybe that's true. Let's just call it a "mistake" tag. This tag has been used extensively by mistake, it really isn't a good tag. If you disagree, go ahead and use it in the database
...but it shouldn't be documented as an accepted tag. If you disagree with that, go ahead and propose how the tag should be documented and a proper discussion process can follow. Note that so far nobody has done this on the wiki, so this may not be a widely held view point at all.
For the rest of us:
