[Tagging] Marking waterway=brook as deprecated and problematic

[Stefan Tauner]

On Wed, 30 Dec 2020 14:59:59 +0000
Philip Barnes <phil at trigpoint.me.uk> wrote:

> 
> 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.

I think this is quite accurately captured by waterway=stream but we may
want to refine the definition regarding "jumpability" a bit. The
defining feature separating big streams (river) and small ones (stream)
should be the approximate flow rate IMHO. This is hard to tell though
for a mapper and I think the reason why the definition of stream came
to be?

The question is if we want/need to further separate stream entities. I
am not a fan of too many "main" values because they make mapping harder
and mistakes much more common. I think that something like width should
be tagged specifically if it is outside a typically expected value range
(a deep river with "only" 3m width or a shallow brook/stream with 5m).
If it varies a lot and the geometry seems important there is also the
riverbank tagging available...

If there were a clear definition what distinguishes a river from a
brook from a stream I would not oppose that at all but I don't see a
need for that either.

-- 
Kind regards/Mit freundlichen Grüßen, Stefan Tauner