Hello. I’m trying to connect a node to the Sacramento River in the Redding, California area and when I try to save it in Id editor it says I can’t because I have reached the 2000 node limit for the way. It seems to be a rule with OSM and not Id editor. Whatever the case, I don’t see how 2000 nodes is a realistic limit considering the river’s large size. So Is there a way around the limit without screwing the river up in the process? The only idea I had was splitting the river into different sections, but it was pretty out of my ability to do without potentially causing major damage in the process. Oh yeah, I just realized its the river bank I am having problems connecting things too, not the actual waterway.
Split the river. It is common for ways to have many splits. It is unusual for the exact same set of attributes to apply for the whole length of a long linear feature. E.g. for a river, it is unlikely that it is the same width for its whole course.
Rapids would be an example of a natural place to split a river.
I don’t see any need to use a relation in this case. The time you might use a relation is if, say, part of the river doubled as part of a canal, in which case you might use a relation for canal.
Relations complicate things for data consumers, are conceptually difficult for (human) editors, and are not particularly well handled in the some of the editing programs.
Actually looking at this, I would suggest that this river is too complex for an average iD user. It is mapped as both a riverbank, which is already a relation ( https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/1342831 ), and as river, for the nominal centre line. The latter has already had to be split because of the topology of the river, e.g. https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/267589665 (which has been mapped as a stream but looks much to big to be a stream - there also appears to be a stray comma in the value field).
I do not think it is reasonable to use a relation for the river centre line. It simply complicates things for data consumers and is difficult for human editors to understand. Also iD is not the best editor for dealing with relations. Given you are an iD user, I would ignore the riverbank, for now, and connect your tributary to the river way, looking for the most logical place to split that way (the junction is one, but there may be a better one.
I’d then get some practice on simpler relations, like bus routes, before tackling the riverbank. I’d also suggest learning the JOSM editor first.
I think you should also put reviewing the whole mapping of the Sacramento on your to do list, as, given points about the use of “stream” and the stray punctuation in the values (which may confuse simpler consumers), it looks to me as though there may be problems with its mapping, but I wouldn’t want to address them from across the Atlantic.