Some mappers are tagging informal/wild/dispersed/undeveloped campsites that are along a road as backcountry=yes. My interpretation is these should be informal=yes, not backcountry.
Some of the mappers (@rsavoye, and @pmckay419) are pretty active mappers and have tagged a lot of sites.
It seems pretty clear to me that backcountry means that it is not by accessible by a road, but since there have been so many tagged this way I want to make sure we have consensus on this continent before I comment on change sets or change anything.
I think most people have been using backcountry=yes to be synonymous with an undeveloped basic dispersed campsite, regardless of whether it is road accessible or not. In common usage, there are many remote but road accessible areas that people still refer to as backcountry. It’s very common on western public lands in the US for remote campsites to be accessible only by long journeys on rough 4x4 roads. I would consider those backcountry campsites just as much as if they were only accessible by hiking trail. They look basically the same on the ground except there’s a dirt track road leading to them.
Also realize the reason this tag combination is so popular is because there’s a preset for it in the ID editor. When a mapper wants to tag a dispersed campsite either along a road or not, backcountry campsite looks like the obvious thing to use.
An additional thought. Backcountry is not necessarily synonymous with informal even along roads. There are lots of places where there are officially designated campsites along primitive roads where even official government agencies use the term backcountry. One prominent example I can think of is the Doll House campsites in Canyonlands National Park. OpenStreetMap . These are tagged with backcountry=yes, and are referred to by the National Park as backcountry campsites, requiring a backcountry camping permit to stay there. Canyonlands National Park Overnight Backcountry Permits, Canyonlands National Park - Recreation.gov . But they are road accessible, at the end of a rough 4x4 road that is a full day’s journey from the nearest paved highway. There are several other similar backcountry campsites in Canyonlands also accessible only by 4x4 roads. Canyonlands also has a number of hike-in only campsites in designated Wilderness areas, but they also call these backcountry campsites and you get the same kind of backcountry camping permit to use them. So in the US it is common even for official government sources to describe road accessible campsites as backcountry.
Actually all the campsites I’ve mapped are accessible by a dirt road, so I agree with pmckay. Many are within designated camping areas by the USFS or BLM, so not informal, but still backcountry. For campsites not in a designated area I guess adding informal=yes would be fine, but the only way to know if it’s designated is to dig through other map sources, and often these areas aren’t on any map, just buried in the official government datasets.
For me the “informal” tag would be for non-authorized locations. In the US west a lot of “backcountry” campsites are developed to the point where there are fire rings, etc. and they are shown on the land manager”s recreation maps. An informal campsite would be one not listed on the land manager’d map. If dispersed camping is allowed it may be okay to camp at an informal site (flat area, probably some evidence of a campfire). But if dispersed camping is not allowed then I probably would not map it.