[Tagging] trees and waterways

[Cartinus]

On Sunday 12 September 2010 01:24:51 Nathan Edgars II wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 11, 2010 at 7:10 PM, David Groom <reviews at pacific-rim.net> 
wrote:
> > I think the difference can be summed up as:
> >
> > With the tagging of trees the definition in the wiki was unclear; "lone
> > or significant" can mean different things to different people.
> >
> > With the tagging of waterways the comment that "the way should be drawn
> > in the direction of the water flow" is quite clear, specific, and not
> > really open to any misinterpretation.
>
> That's true, but it's not the whole story. Much of the problem with
> trees is that enough people had tagged them without knowing what the
> wiki said, and so the actual tagging deviated from the documentation
> on the wiki. That's also the case with waterway direction.

If you think that the current convention is not mentioned in enough places in 
the wiki, then you can easily add it to more wiki pages. Nobody is going to 
complain about that.

If you find rivers not mapped according to the current convention, you can fix 
them. Nobody is going to complain about that.

If you are going to advocate the misuse of a tag that means something else, 
then people will complain. Not only because it is misuse, but also because it 
doesn't solve your problem. People mapped those rivers "wrong" because they 
either didn't know the direction of flow, didn't care for the direction of 
flow or were not aware of the current convention. Changing the current 
convention does have _absolutely_ no effect on any of these causes.

Last but not least: What people want to change about trees is after the 
tagging changed. That is documenting what happens. What you want to change 
about rivers, is trying to force your world view onto other people. This last 
is generally considered bad form in OSM.


-- 
m.v.g.,
Cartinus