[OSM-talk] Failed water proposal reversal

[Tomas Straupis]

> 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.

  I do not want to „eliminate“ water=*
  I want to go back to the situation before the water proposal - with
landuse=reservoir, waterway=riverbank, landuse=basin, etc. etc. As it
used to be, and as it was and is still being mapped.

> 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.

  At least in Lithuania we have an agreement for YEARS as how to map
water bodies and we ARE updating mapping in Lithuania according to
those agreements, because this is what data consumers are expecting.

> 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.

  If in the final GIS database we get a POLYGON with
waterway=riverbank I see no difference as to how it was mapped - as a
way, or as a relation.

  If you are referring to the old problem where tags are placed on
outer way in relation rather than a relation itself then yes, that is
a problem but it has nothing to do with discussion about water
tagging.

-- 
Tomas