[Tagging] Is the difference between power station and sub station clear?

[Ole Nielsen / osm]

> On 21.01.2013 01:54, François Lacombe wrote:
>> May someone answers that question
>
> power=station is used for large, fenced areas where high voltage is
> transformed to medium voltage. In German: Umspannwerk
>
> power=sub_station is used for smaller objects, like buildings with 2m each
> side and a height of a few m, where medium voltage is transformed to low
> voltage. In German: Trafohäuschen (or Trafostation)

That is a misunderstanding that was unfortunately introduced in the early
days of OSM. The creator of the 'station' tag, Bahnpirat, has admitted it
was a mistake, see
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Power_lines#RFC_-_draft. In English as
substation is a substation never a 'station'. A 'power station' in English
is the same as a power plant! This leads to confusion among mappers
resulting in quite a few power plants tagged as 'stations' according to my
experience.

I have seen a lot of small 'Trafohäuschens' tagged as 'station'
(especially in the Netherlands) so the distinction is not that clear to
mappers. Using voltage=* to indicate the catagory of substation is much
better.

> No, it was rejected. It did not get enough votes.

The start of voting was never properly announced on this list. Maybe that
could explain the few votes. I only discovered the voting by accident.
Maybe it should be revived for a new vote?

>
> Maybe. Spelling errors have been corrected in other cases too (e.g.
> type=broad_leafed).

We are all aware that that underscore is wrong but it is quite difficult
to get rid of it since 'substation' is currently not supported by
renderers and editors. 'broad_leafed' was easier as none of the mainstream
renderers are rendering it anyway, AFAIK.

> This is a consensus among 2 persons at best. This does not legitimate you
> to
> make vast changes to the Wiki. There should at least be a topic in the
> wiki
> talk page for some months.

Discussions about tagging are supposed to take place here, not on 'talk'.

>
> And first of all you should contact user "aliponte" who did a lot of work
> mapping power networks in central Europe.
>
>> Do everyone agree with that?
>
> No, I disagree.
>
> On 24.01.2013 22:46, Ole Nielsen wrote:
>> I have now marked http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:power%3Dstation
>> as
>> deprecated, removed 'power=station' from the "power features" template
>> meaning it's gone from all language versions of Map Features using the
>> template and removed links from a few feature pages.
>
> This is really bad. Please revert these changes immediately. Otherwise
> I'll
> do it, but I am afraid that I would miss some of the affected pages.

I think you should first justify why 'station' is a correct tag (i.e. a
substation and not a power station).

Ole