[Tagging] drinkable vs. drinking_water

[Tobias Knerr]

On 13.07.2012 02:12, Andrew Errington wrote:
> I expect that "trunk road", "roundabout", "shelter" and
> "archaeological site" are not well known in all languages, however,
> the language of OSM is English and "potable" has a very clear meaning.

Wikipedia seems to think that "potable water" and "drinking water" mean
the same thing, though.

> You could dumb-down the meaning in the dialog that asks "Is this
> drinking water?" and set potable yes/no.  You can dumb-down the
> rendering and make it display 'drinking water' if potable=yes.

What use is having a precise word as the key name when users are
presented with the "easy" word in the interface anyway, and will make
their tagging decisions based on that? Any precision possibly gained by
using a more precise term goes out of the window at that point.

Besides, it's standard OSM practice to make tags accessible without
hiding them behind a dumbed-down interface, and lots of tools (think
e.g. taginfo, osm.org website, or style sheets) only display raw tags.

So a key like "potable" just seems unnecessarily complex language. It's
also easily confused with "portable".

Tobias