I’ve noticed that many waterways in Israel are not accurately tagged.
Seasonal streams, dry unless it’s raining, should be marked as waterway=wadi. They would appear as dashed blue lines in the standard OSM slippymap.
Regular streams should be waterway=stream, and only major ones should be marked rivers.
Thanks for the note on waterway=wadi. That’s a very important distinction. However, AFAIK, waterway=wadi is not a common OSM tag. Currently, there is only one wadi in Israel - Nachal Yagur…
One OSM definition of a stream is “A naturally-formed waterway that is too thin to be classed as a river. An active, able-bodied person should be able to jump over it if trees along it aren’t too thick.” Using this definition will help distinguish rivers from streams. It also means that a wadi can turn into a stream when it reaches a spring, and a stream may turn into a river as it flows down and widens.
When I was tagging streams, I looked for something like waterway=wadi and did not find any mention of it. In fact, a couple years ago we said in this forum that “stream” was the the correct tag instead (http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=10343). And I still cannot find it on the OSM wiki page.
It is nice to know that “wadi” renders correctly as a dashed blue line. But I really think we should get it to be more accepted before we switch all the streams to wadis.
This should be done based on personal knowledge of the streams/wadis and not in bulk.
The only way to get it to be more accepted is to start changing them little by little.
I would also like to raise the question if we have tagged the major rivers / streams of Israel already.
What do you think is the status we have on this elements?
The major rivers (as far as Israel has any major ones) are there. But there’s still a lot to be done. Nahal Taninim for instance is not tagged, Nahal Dishon is missing. Many wadis in the Judean Desert are not named, or named in English only.
A disadvantage of the standard slippy map rendering of the wadi tag is that it’s not named .