[OSM-talk] Failed water proposal reversal

[Christoph Hormann]

On Monday 20 June 2016, Tomas Straupis wrote:
> 2016-06-19 23:35 GMT+03:00 Ilya Zverev:
> > <...> the proposal about water=* was
> > accepted by 16 mappers, and if you have a problem with that, then I
> > agree that we should change our proposal process, but in all these
> > years nobody has even started.
>
>   Accepted by 16(!) wiki editors but ignored by thousands of mappers.
>   5 years after acceptance according to tagwatch:
>   "new" tag usage
>   water=reservoir 79937
>   water=riverbank 1085
>
>   "old" tag usage
>   landuse=reservoir 387793
>   waterway=riverbank 293319

You are either deliberately or due to misinformation distorting things 
here.  The water=* is widely used and accepted, there are >700k uses in 
line with the proposal (an additional 255k for the deprecated 
water=intermittent).

The waterway=riverbank tag is considered equivalent to natural=water + 
water=river, mappers may use either depending on what they prefer.  
There are good arguments for either of these options.

If you want to eliminate use of water=* from OSM you'd need to convince 
the community of this.  A formal proposal can be used but without 
convincing arguments on the matter this stands little chance in being 
approved.

You however must not retag features with those tags to something else 
just for its own sake (i.e. outside normal mapping) - this would not be 
acceptable and would ultimately lead to reversal of such changes and 
possibly bans from editing.

If you want to do something productive you could clean up the frequent 
occurences of duplicate and sometimes contradicting tags on member ways 
and multipolygon relations for river mapping.  One of the problems of 
the waterway=riverbank tag is that it was originally meant and is 
widely understood to be a way tag while today it should normally be 
applied to the multipolygons relation.  Cleaning up such ambiguities - 
not mechanically as it has been suggested in the past but with 
individual verification - using either waterway=riverbank or 
natural=water + water=river would be a very good deed.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/