Like Adam, my experience is with backcountry camping sites located within
wilderness areas. These sites usually consist of a cluster of camp pitches and
related facilities like fire rings, pit toilets, etc. They do not generally
have well-defined geographic boundaries, so it would be inappropriate to map
them as polygons. However, they often have a name, access restrictions, an
operator, a webpage, or other information that should be tagged somehow.
In these cases I map the campsite as a site relation with tourism=camp_site,
and I place all of the other relevant tags (name, access, operator, website,
etc) on the relation. I then add the various individual features belonging to
the campsite (tourism=camp_pitch, amenity=toilets, etc), which are usually
mapped as nodes or ways, as members of the relation.
I would not recommend adding a node tagged tourism=camp_site into this picture,
as in my opinion it would be redundant with the site relation and a violation
of the "one feature, one OSM element" guideline. I think that a camp site with
an indeterminate boundary should either be represented in OSM by a site
relation tagged tourism=camp_site, or a node with that tag, but not by both.
And when the individual features of the camp site are also mapped, I prefer the
relation because it groups the associated features together, and does not
require inventing an approximate centroid of the camping area at which to
locate the camp site node.
To add to Adam's examples, consider North Cascades National Park in Washington.
Nearly all of the camping areas listed on this webpage
<https://www.nps.gov/noca/planyourvisit/wilderness-trip-planner.htm> are deep
in the backcountry, but each has a name, number of individual pitches, varying
permit requirements and fire restrictions, and other information that is useful
to tag in OSM. Currently most are mapped as nodes, but I think if one was
micromapping the individual features at a given campsite it would be reasonable
to then group them together in a site relation which described the camping area
as a whole.
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