On Wednesday 16 October 2013, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote: > > > > I added this to that wiki page but it has been around for a long > > time (on http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:waterway since > > 2007). > > Yes, the "rule of thumb" if you can jump over it, it is a stream, is > there for a long time. On the other hand this depends how long you > can jump (I guess it is safe to asume that a young person with > average abilities can jump 3-4 meters, the world record is like 8 > something).
My interpretation always was that it means where an able person can and would practically jump across if needed (that is even on an elaborate hike with a backpack and no sport shoes). That pretty much puts the 2 meters at the upper limit. > IMHO our river classification is rather poor at the > moment, we have only 2 classes: river and stream but 3 classes for > artificial waterways (ditch, drain and canal). My own mapping for > rivers uses this rule: where I map there is an official setting what > is considered a river (based on different, > non-uniform/consistent rules and also on historic reasons), and > everything else (if natural) is a stream, regardless whether I could > jump over it or not. The stream/river distinction is not very useful for anything, partly because it is not applied strictly but also because the criterion fails to make any sense in dry regions with intermittent waterways that at some point can always be jumped across which leads to 'rivers' of significant size like http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/134387449 http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/190293793 being (formally correctly) tagged as stream. But it is especially pointless since major imports in the US and Canada tag everything as stream as can be seen on: http://www.imagico.de/map/pict/osm_waterway_l.png It would simply have been much better if the stream/river distinction was optional and people would not be forced to decide on one of them. -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/ _______________________________________________ Imports mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/imports
