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

[Tomas Straupis]

2021-02-10, tr, 16:45 rašė:
> 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.

  Basically what I've already mentioned:
  1. QA tools: there are numerous QA tools (not only keepright,
osmose, geofabrik) which are doing periodic data verification,
riverbank is a very important feature there it is included in many
rules. Those would be topology rules (riverbank must not overlap other
first grade features, waterway must have waterway=river|stream
crossing). QA tools help detect accidental damage of data by newbies
or people misusing tools, it also is essential for cartography: some
calculations require some specific rules to be true.
  2. Cartography - you display rivers as ways at some scales, but
polygons (riverbanks) on larger scales.
  3. Videos/blogposts/training material/books. These are especially
hard because it could be minimal mentioning of the tag in some
example. It would be very hard (say videos) or impossible (printed
books) to change to the new version.

  Note: I'm not against improving/evolving etc. But it must have a
good reason/benefit. And in the case of water it has NO benefit.
  Just for a thought: For more than ten years I've red millions of
discussions on which word is better for a tag to describe this or
that. Ant more I hear it, more I see that even for native English
speakers it is impossible to objectively describe a class with one_two
words (and most mappers are NOT native English speakers). And in this
case having a word as a key=value could probably be bad, as people
could make incorrect judgements. If somebody wants to know full
details, they have to go to the wiki. In that case, why not do what
professional GIS does - use codes, like key=gc01, subkey=gs51 etc.
Then if you want to change description of some class/subclass you do
not have to change the data.

-- 
Tomas