[Tagging] Marking waterway=brook as deprecated and problematic

[Philip Barnes]

On Wed, 2020-12-30 at 09:35 -0500, Brian M. Sperlongano wrote:
> I support this deprecation.
> 
> I note that there are 2.6M instances of waterway=stream +
> intermittent=yes, compared to 2,000 instances of waterway=brook, a
> 1,300 to 1 ratio.  Also, it appears that
> waterway=stream+intermittent=yes is an exact replacement of
> waterway=brook.
> 
> In general I would be in favor of a policy of speedy deprecation of
> any cases where there is a clear substitution available, the lesser
> tag was not approved via proposal, and the usage ratio between the
> two tagging systems (based on comparison of exact tag combinations)
> is above some number (like 100:1 or perhaps even as low as 10:1).
> 
> On Wed, Dec 30, 2020 at 8:12 AM Mateusz Konieczny via Tagging <
> tagging at openstreetmap.org> wrote:
> > waterway=brook has minimal use and plenty of issues
> > 
> > See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:waterway%3Dbrook
> > https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Tag:waterway%3Dbrook
> > 
> > Therefore I marked it as deprecated.
> > 
> > If anyone has counterarguments to any of issues raised in 2015 - it
> > is a good moment
> > to raise them

I have never used this tag however the wiki definition has widely
missed the common usage of the word brook by a country mile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rothley_Brook

A brook as I understand it from growing up in areas where the term is
commonly used, it is never intermittent.

A brook is between a stream and a river. Usually too wide to jump but
certainly too shallow or small for boats or to swim in. Deep enough to
fall in and get soaked, something I used to do regularly as a child.

Phil (trigpoint)