[Tagging] Marking waterway=brook as deprecated and problematic

[Paul Allen]

On Wed, 30 Dec 2020 at 23:48, Clifford Snow <clifford at snowandsnow.us> wrote:

>
> Take the Skagit River [1], which flows through my town. Undisputable
> river. Yet the headwaters [2] in British Columbia, CA can't even be seen on
> aerial imagery. Other than rivers that start out large, like from a large
> body of water, likely start out as a stream that even I could just step
> over.
>

Rivers do that.  They don't start full-width.


> We could classify the headwaters as a stream but where does it change into
> a river?
>

Where you can no longer jump over it.  Yeah, vague definition.

In the UK, one of the background layers comes from Ordnance Survey.
They show rivers starting out as streams and, at some point, getting wider.
I figure they're as able-bodied as I am when it comes to jumping, so I go
by what they have (unless it's clear from aerial imagery that they're
wrong).  E.g.,
https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=52.10775&mlon=-4.63354#map=17/52.10775/-4.63354
<https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=52.10775&mlon=-4.63354#map=17/52.10775/-4.63354&layers=N>


> Is it ever a brook?
>

Not at present.  And probably never will be.

>
> The solution is to just use natual=stream. If the locals call it a river
> or not it's still in OSM. If data exists with flow rate it could be added
> to OSM.
>

Your proposal loses some subtleties.  Like this, which is clearly an unnamed
stream feeding into a named river.
https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=52.10455&mlon=-4.63709#map=17/52.10455/-4.63709
Do it your way and it's an unnamed stream merging with a named stream.

Replacing a crude approximation with an even cruder approximation loses
use more than it gains.  Whether something is a pond or a lake or a pool
gives meta-information that can be used in searches, but the representation
on standard carto looks the same.  Standard carto renders streams and
rivers differently.  You may not see a need to render streams and rivers
differently, unless you're planning a hike somewhere...

-- 
Paul
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