+1 Apart from a water company person, I have never heard anyone use potable, in English it is jargon used in the industry. My understanding came from recognising a French word. Workplace taps are labelled as either drinking water, or not drinking water. I have never seen potable used.
Phil -- Sent from my Nokia N9 On 13/07/2012 9:02 Ilari Kajaste wrote: On 13 July 2012 05:35, Andrew Errington <erringt...@gmail.com> wrote: > Anyway, I don't think we should assume other people are stupid and > choose 'simple' words just for the sake of it. It seems that we all > know what potable means, but we are worried that other mappers, whom > we have never met, won't understand. Let me assure you, they are just > as smart as you. No. (And please don't equate knowing words with being smart. Especially don't do it for the purposes of twisting the opposing arguent to imply something it doesn't imply. That's just empty rhetorics.) Anecdote: My English is excellent, but English is not my primary language. My english vocabulary is large. Yet, I didn't know "potable" before this discussion. I did know "trunk road", "roundabout", "shelter" and "archeological site" very well. I would expect "drinkable" to mean "whatever is produced by this tagged feature is safe to drink", and "drinking_water" to mean "somewhere in the tagged area there is a feature that provides access to water that is safe to drink". I also did understand that "drinkable", strictly speaking, means that it's _possible_ to drink it, not that it's _safe_. But come on, are we mapping here, or defining physical properties of substances? This isn't OpenPhysicsEngine. Of course, I'm just an anecdote here. But from what I've read of the discussion, it seems my anecdote might represent a larger set of mappers as well. I don't really care which word is used. I generally like specificity, but this seems like an edge case. Due to way OSM is tagged, it should default to most natural possible words in tags. And at least internationally, it seems "drinkable" is considered more natural. And since it's also a synonym in any normal use (so no specificity is lost), that's the word that should be used for the tag. -- - Ilari Kajaste - E-Mail: erringt...@gmail.com WWW: http://iki.fi/ilari.kajaste _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list erringt...@gmail.com http://iki.fi/ilari.kajaste
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