[Talk-is] Cleanup rivers

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 11:47 AM, Davíð Jakobsson<rimmugygur at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have noticed that that many rivers have two ways, one tagged
> waterway=river and another tagged waterway=riverbank. My guess is that
> originally someone mapped the river and tagged it waterway=river and the
> someone else came along and mapped the river more accurately and tagged it
> waterway=riverbank. My question is then, shouldn't we delete the way that is
> tagged waterway=river where the two ways are overlaided or is there any
> purpose to keep them both.

The currently recommended way of doing things is to keep both of them,
see this documentation:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:waterway%3Driverbank

The reason is that some tools only look at the waterway=river ways
while others care about riverbanks (like the mapnik renderer).

Of course you might have encountered a river somewhere where someone
didn't follow this schema at all and wrongly used one or both of the
tags.