drop rendering for waterway=wadi

[matkoniecz]

As discussed on tagging mailing list[a] and described on wiki[b] this tag is ambiguous. It may mean ephemeral river, valley, typical course of flash floods. What worse word wadi is used in multiple languages with multiple meanings. There are also additional problems.

It is recommended to use waterway=river/waterway=stream + intermittent=yes for waterways, natural=valley for valleys.

I am proposing to drop rendering of this tag.

[a] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2015-January/thread.html - thread "waterway=wadi problem"
[b] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:waterway%3Dwadi

[dieterdreist]

Am 11.03.2015 um 17:24 schrieb Mateusz Konieczny notifications@github.com:

It may mean ephemeral river, valley, typical course of flash floods. What worse word wadi is used in multiple languages with multiple meanings. There are also additional problems.

It is recommended to use waterway=river/waterway=stream + intermittent=yes for waterways, natural=valley for valleys.

I am proposing to drop rendering of this tag.

I agree that the tagging you propose is more generic and might be universally applicable for similar features, but I don't agree that the meaning in Arabic (valley) is a problem, there has been a definition in the wiki, and the key waterway does give enough context not to apply this tag to valleys

cheers,
Martin

[pnorman]

As discussed on tagging mailing list[a] and described on wiki[b] this tag is ambiguous. It may mean ephemeral river, valley, typical course of flash floods. What worse word wadi is used in multiple languages with multiple meanings. There are also additional problems.

It is recommended to use waterway=river/waterway=stream + intermittent=yes for waterways, natural=valley for valleys.

I am proposing to drop rendering of this tag.

It sounds like the tagging change and rendering change are occurring in the wrong order

[matthijsmelissen]

It sounds like the tagging change and rendering change are occurring in the wrong order

I agree.

[matkoniecz]

What would be a good point to drop rendering? Used less than 1k times? Currently it is used 18 343 times - http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/waterway=wadi

[sommerluk]

Now 11 170 ways with this tag.

[sommerluk]

Down to 6253 usages on ways now.

[imagico]

Reopening since:

• use is now about 1/3 of what it was when the issue was closed
• the tag has been deprecated for several years now
• there is very little active use of the tag, most remaining occurrences are from edits at least several years old, in particular three groups from individual mappers in Tunisia, Pakistan and southern Turkey from about 4 years ago account for nearly half of the data.

[polarbearing]

+1 for dropping.
Maybe the PL wiki page could be changed to use the proper Deprecated template, instead of "description=Do not use, see the wiki page".

[sommerluk]

+1 for dropping

If the feature is ambiguous and can mean two different things, the rendering will always be bad for at least one the these two meaning.

[pnorman]

in particular three groups from individual mappers in Tunisia, Pakistan and southern Turkey from about 4 years ago account for nearly half of the data.

This is the most compelling part for me.

[jeisenbe]

Usage chart:

Compare to intermittent=yes used over 2 million times on waterway features, including 1.9 million intermittent streams alone.