[Tagging] Deprecation - waterway=riverbank vs water=river

[Tomas Straupis]

2021-02-10, tr, 14:56 rašė:
> this concerns the usage of `waterway=riverbank` and
> `natural=water; water=river` which are currently considered
> <...>

  It is important to understand at least the basic rules of IT:
  1. Do not touch it if it works.
  2. If you want to change something in widespread use, benefits of
additional work for change should be seriously outweighed by the
benefits of the new thing (and water=river has no advantage over
riverbank whatsoever it tags exactly the same thing).

  One has to understand, that these key=value pairs are not only
something "in the database". These are values in huge amount of
products, QA rules, training materials, books as well as peoples
minds. Any change of widespread tags is very bad.

  What we have now:
  1. waterway=riverbank is original (older) tagging.
  2. waterway=riverbank outnumbers water=river in usage.
waterway=riverbank 251 166 and water=river 152 993*.

  Therefore water=river is the clear candidate for removal if we look
at basic principles of IT.

P.S. Most water=river usage is generated by rogue behaviour of iD
coders who push their own opinion on different tags and force
unknowing users to change tags by lying about "deprecated" tags.

-- 
Tomas