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

[Tomas Straupis]

2021-02-11, kt, 09:35 Mateusz Konieczny via Tagging rašė:
> But there are also many cases where it resulted in changing
> proposed tagging schema for better
> (traffic calming=hillocky vs circle_bumps vs mini_bumps is the
> latest case, see
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Tag:traffic_calming%3Dmini_bumps
> )

  traffic calming is not such a prominent feature. At the time of vote
(2011) original as still more widely used water schema has been used
in hundreds of thousands of objects. Also water is a feature, which is
used in almost every single map created.
  16 people (and I would stress: inexperienced people) deprecating a
schema which is used so widely is absurd.
  If OSM would have been a company, proposer of such thing and all
"yes" voters would be fired immediately with bad recommendations :-)

  When we talk about proposals of how to tag the colour of a bench
backrest I see no problem of inexperienced people
participating/deciding as it is... well not important anyway.

> Requiring proposal process to pass is quite effective limit,
> it is quite hard to succesfuly pass proposal that deprecates
> widely used tags.

  Maybe there is a reason for this? It is a basic thing in IT -
benefit of change must be much higher than the cost of change (and I'm
NOT talking about data update - that one is extremely cheap). This
means that you need a veeeeery good reason/benefit in order to change
widely used tag (think about deprecating highway=* as the name is
incorrect for actual usage today).

  If we would block attempts to deprecate widely used tags this would
also reduce the clutter of tagging list.
  If we do not block attempts to deprecate widely used tags, new
versions do not mean better ones, think of disaster of public
transport schemas.

-- 
Tomas