[Tagging] Rio de la Plata edit war

[Christoph Hormann]

On Tuesday 04 August 2020, Adam Franco wrote:
> It seems to me that the main underlying conflict is that (at least in
> the default Carto rendering on openstreetmap.org a few years ago) the
> Rio Plata was getting rendered as land at low-zooms and South America
> simply looks wrong when such a large water area is rendered as land.
>
> https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/1604 is a
> very long issue thread [...]

That is old history.

OSM-Carto does not distinguish between rendering of riverbank polygons 
and rendering of the water polygons created from the coastline data.  
The only difference at the moment is that a (cartographically 
counterproductive) way_area filtering is applied to the riverbank and 
natural=water polygons.  That has been reduced significantly earlier 
this year in

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/4060

but still distorts rendering to some extent.  It however is not relevant 
for large riverbank polygons like we discuss here.

As i have said earlier in this discussion it would be highly desirable 
for consistent mapping if we would actually distinguish different 
waterbody classes in rendering.  A change for that has been suggested 
last October:

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/3930

was already merged but then reverted due to opposition from one of the 
maintainers.  There is a new suggestion to implement this:

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/4128

but it seems still contested.  Getting this change merged and released 
would go a long way towards mappers developing consensus on coastline 
placement since it would provide feedback on the coastline position 
without favoring a particular placement.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/