How do I add a region's name?

For example, a range of hills with a collective name, or a plot of land, or collection of woods or something like that.

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Hello CrysMelyn and welcome to the forum.

For mountain ranges there is natural=mountain_range. The wiki page includes this information:

This tag has not been clearly defined, and has problems with Verifiability, especially for very large mountain ranges or when mapped as an area.

Please make sure to only map objects that are objectivly verifiable. Can you maybe list some examples of “regions” that you would like to map?

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To add on to @os-emmer 's good answer…
In OSM we generally try to be more specific when describing features. Rather than “region”, we might instead use:

  • Range of hills with collective name: natural=mountain_range with name=*
  • Plot of land: boundary=administrative or similar. *
  • Collection of woods: A multipolygon with natural=wood

If truly nothing else can describe your feature other than region, you may look into place=locality. However personally I would discourage its use. Better to create your own tag or use a proposed (or even rejected) tag than to be so vague, in my opinion.

*Note

Many contributors consider individual plots of land (as in, owned by individuals) to be out of scope of OSM. It has been discussed at length but AFAIK no consensus has been reached. See scope. My take is that they indeed do not belong in OSM.

The main things I was thinking of were things like parishes (I guess which aren’t mapped) and mountain ranges, peninsulas, or other geographical regions that are commonly referred to or searched for on maps.

To use a specific, minor example, eastern Scotland has, going northwards from the river Tay, the carse of Gowrie (a stretch of low-lying agricultural land and villages) before the Sidlaws (some hills), before Strathmore (another, larger, flat agricultural region), before the Angus Glens (a mountainous region) within the larger Grampian Mountain Range.

Funny enough, sometimes with current tags not really possible :smiley: I added a mountain in our city with locality=mountain with name and the wikidata entry.
Also thought about natural=mountain but it seems i forgot to add this afterwards after checking right now.

But on topic, in Key:natural - OpenStreetMap Wiki you might find something you could use as well.

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People have had a couple of goes at this over the years.

One attempt was a proposal to “define the fuzziness” of a feature without clear boundaries. Nothing is currently using that tag so that approach wasn’t a success.

Sometimes people do use place=locality on nodes or areas. An example is Ashdown Forest. That doesn’t lend itself to either boundary=forest, landuse=forest or natural=wood since it doesn’t have clearly defined boundaries.

The problem with using a way for Ashdown Forest and this monstrosity of a North Sea relation is that there are not fixed boundaries. One approach that might work here is to use a node and then say how big it is with a value such as sqkm. There are around 100 non-country places.

It depends on the region, but parishes often are mapped. In England and Wales, if they exist**, they’re admin_level=10, for example Berwick. Elsewhere religious parishes are mapped, though that tends to get people tutting about “non-verifiable data”.

If you want to see what actual usage of some sort of concept is, try searching taginfo - type the search term into the box at the top right, look at the keys and also the values.

** there are “unparished areas”

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