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

[manday at openmail.cc]

On Wed, Feb 10, 2021 at 03:36:56PM +0200, Tomas Straupis wrote:
>   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.

Tomas, I respect your general attitude towards this matter and I think  
I can appreciate how you feel about this being, on the one hand,  
seemingly cosmetic but having, on the other, implications for  
potential breakings. I do not share it, however. I think that any step  
of cleaning up (even tiny matters) comes with a risk of leaving  
someone behind who isn't willing or ready to keep up. It is about  
finding a balance.

That said, I think from those figures you quoted, we can tell that if  
this breaks for someone, suggesting they supported only  
`waterway=riverbank`, then that someone has a problem to begin with.  
`water=river` is defined as one (one may even say "the only correct",  
as by [1]) method to define river areas since 2011 and there are  
hundreds of thousands of instances of it.

I called for your experience, can you please substantiate your view by  
giving (not only hypothetical) examples where this would cause actual  
problems? I could not find any.

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Water_details



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