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

[Ole Nielsen]

On 29/01/2013 21:00, François Lacombe wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> Here is my discussion with aliponte, as suggested by Friedrich Volkmann
> I've contacted him last week end.
> I've asked him before if he minds copying it here.

Thanks for making the contact with him. He is bringing up some valid 
points (not that I agree to all of them). We have the line vs minor_line 
distinction which is also somewhat arbitrary and the related tower vs 
pole problem. These were all introduced in the early days of osm without 
providing some rigid guidelines on how to distinguish them (the result 
occasionally being some strange tagging). However, one difference to the 
station/substation discussion is that these tags are not "incorrect" in 
that they refer to correct English terms. Also trying to change 
minor_line or pole would be difficult since those values have been used 
literally hundreds of thousands of times. (personally I tag anything 
below 50 kV as minor_line/pole).

And of course there is the line vs cable discussion but that is in a 
different thread.

My pragmatic suggestion on station vs substation is to keep the 
deprecation of station, advice mappers to use substation and add a 
voltage tag when possible. Data consumers may treat any substation 
without a voltage tag as "small". In time the larger substations will 
probably be visited by interested mappers who can add voltage tags etc 
(380 kV lines connecting to "small" substations should attract 
attention). Data consumers should continue to support 'station' for the 
time being until the use of the tag is clearly declining. One thing: 
Don't perform any mass retagging of 'station'!

Ole