I’m about to map some (ecologically disastrous) illegal open pit gold mines in West Africa. I’ve seen some of those tagged with landuse=quarry, “An area of land used for surface extraction (open-pit mining)” and ore is documented as a legitimate extracted material. Meanwhile I found the much rarer landuse=industrial + industrial=mine, which may offer richer potential but seems intended for complex mining sites… But its illustration is a typical open-pit mine.
Considering the chaotic devastation around Ehuiasso Aloungounou, lacking the visible organisation of a proper legit mine, I lean towards landuse=quarry with resource=gold, those two being a common combination according to Taginfo.
Well, I think writing this led me to answer my own question… But I’m leaving this here, in case better ways come up.
We map what’s on the ground, regardless of the “legality” of the things on the ground. This is no different in principle to mapping a fence that is “illegally” built across land that doesn’t belong to the fence owner, or mapping a building that was built without the proper local permits. It’s not up to any of us to determine the “legality” of the mapped objects in question.
Mapping what is clearly an open-pit mine as something else is absurd. Just because a gold mine in West Africa is “illegal” in the eyes of the government having jurisdiction does not mean it isn’t a gold mine. Mapping a mine as hazard=quicksilver or something else is absurd; why is mercury a hazard there? Because there’s an open-pit gold mine in operation.
@Jean-Marc_Liotier: map the actual mining pits as landuse=quarry, and the overarching areas encompassing the entire mining operations as landuse=industrial, industrial=mine. If you believe the operations in question don’t represent a full-fledged mine you can omit the encompassing area and just map the quarries.
we in fact map illegally built buildings, delete illegally cut down trees, if it is verifiable and signposted mapping POIs is fine no matter whether they are legal or not, mapping illegal crossings is fine (though put access=no on them)
if there is industrial site it does not matter one bit is it built legally or not
that was also my idea but after taking look at aerial imagery approximate mapping everything landuse=quarry is better than nothing and I do not feel able to map it in such detail
BTW, thanks to @Jean-Marc_Liotier spotting it. Changes between various aerials are impressive and not in a good way.
