[OSM-talk] Ditches

[John Smith]

2009/12/15 Steve Bennett <stevagewp at gmail.com>:
> That's the right thing to do.

Right is a preconceived notion, in this case it's the lazy thing to
do, not nessicarily the right thing to do.

> Not if you document them. I agree that you can't leave everything up

This is where explicit tagging can save people from poor/badly
written/thought up documentation.

> to interpretation, but a road and a waterway crossing without a
> junction is, by convention (and rather reasonably so), a road crossing
> over the water. If nothing else, it's a far more frequent scenario
> than continuously pouring across a public road, and there's a tag for
> that.

Frequent for which location/place? You are already making assumptions
about what you consider as normal, not what is most common in the
world at large.

> This isn't Law&Order. The whole tagging system is a means whereby

This has nothing to do with law, but "knowing" what someone else
tagged, rather than guessing.

> humans can store facts about the world efficiently, in order that they
> can be used unambiguously by tools such as renderers. For that to
> work, we need good documentation of what the tags mean, and how to
> interpret them.

Humans tend to be lazy, the whole y2k bug thing, which was overly
hyped anyway, wasn't due to lack of bits of memory for storing the
full year, not just the last 2 digits, it was just human laziness that
dropped the first 2 digits and this is a similar case, dropping a tag
because it isn't seen as relevent at this exact moment in time.