[Tagging] Wadi vs intermittent stream?

[Tod Fitch]

In the southwest of the United States there are numerous features locally called a "wash" which is an intermittent natural drainage channel that only carries water during and immediately after large rainstorms. The ones I've looked at in my area of interest are typically tagged waterway=stream, intermittent=yes.

When looking into how to render them I have become aware of an alternative tagging of waterway=wadi as mentioned at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:waterway%3Dwadi

If I am looking at taginfo correctly, intermittent=yes is far more used that waterway=wadi:

http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/compare/intermittent=yes/waterway=wadi

wadi=yes is only used a handful of times so I will ignore it for now.

It seems to me that using waterway=* and intermittent=yes is more useful as one can distinguish between minor (waterway=stream) and major (waterway=river) features. And one can also use intermittent=yes for other water related items like the local "tanks" which are small reservoirs found scattered around ranch land which may only hold water for the cattle during limited seasons of the year.

With at least one renderer that I am looking at, the default database creation tool supports waterway=wadi but not intermittent=*.

So which is the preferred tagging?

If waterway=wadi then I have some OSM editing to do but at least the renderer should be easy. If waterway=stream, intermittent=yes then I need to get some changes done by the project who's rendering database I am using.

Cheers,
Tod