[Tagging] Marking waterway=brook as deprecated and problematic

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

sent from a phone

> On 30. Dec 2020, at 20:20, Stefan Tauner <stefan.tauner at gmx.at> wrote:
> 
> I would never tag a waterway that is only <20cm deep as river - no
> matter how wide it is.


it looks as if you’re from Austria, and there it wouldn’t make sense to have a watercourse as shallow as 20cm and call it river, but in other parts of the world there are rivers that fall completely dry and are still regarded rivers.

there are a lot of different names for types of watercourses (I suspect this is true for many languages), often with different implications of the nature (fast/slow, man made or natural, in the mountains or flat area, used for irrigation or drainage or navigation, etc.) and we are reducing this to a very small set of waterway values, adding additional descriptions in subtags (e.g. intermittent=yes/no). This already implies that a river or stream in OpenStreetMap tagging may eventually be not considered such in natural language. 

This said, I believe we could have a third class between stream (you can jump over, which is like <1-2m) and river. 

I also agree that many streams will be hard to jump over, but switching the definition to the amount of water per time seems not feasible for OpenStreetMap. 

Cheers Martin