Talk:Tag:barrier=ditch

barrier=ditch doubles waterway=ditch?

In response to the recent edit: "Ditch" might be an unfortunate choise for the value, as far as browsing wiktionary goes; barrier=trench (used only once) might have been better, as that seems not to imply anything about a waterway at the bottom of the long, narrow intendation, whereas "ditch" might be taken by the native English speakers to have a such connotation. Usage to date suggests that most of the time users enter just a waterway=ditch (200 000+ uses) - it's hard to imagine a water filled ditch without it being a barrier, and we don't tag bigger waterways with both waterway=* and barrier=*. For really miniscule waterways that don't pose a barrier for most uses, there's waterway=brook (see also Key:waterway/Narrow_variants). On the other hand, there are empty ditches/trenches, that don't for the most part of the year don't channel any water (or never do), but are definitively barriers. Hence it's not always possible to substitute a barrier=ditch with a waterway=ditch. Alv 09:03, 17 October 2011 (BST)

I made this edit because I had to map a ditch (empty at the time of my mapping) and saw there were two tags for it. In page waterway=ditch, it is said that it may be dry most of the year. I understand it as: it can be empty all the time. Given that definition, I don't see any difference between both tags. I agree that "waterway" is not an obvious tag to map ditches (all the more a dry ones). I assume waterway=ditch implicitly is a barrier, as waterway=[stream|river|canal|...] are, because we don't tag them as barrier... maybe that's the point?

We have two tags to map the same object with the same properties (may hold water and is a barrier) and I think it's not a good practice. The intent of my edit was to prevent the use of multiple tags for same thing or at least minimize it. --Oligo 10:51, 17 October 2011 (BST)

Worse than two tags for identical things is two meanings for one tag, i.e. if people were to use waterway=ditch for trenches that most people wouldn't ever consider waterways. Alv 06:57, 21 October 2011 (BST)

man_made

Perhaps this should be renamed man_made=trench? This would solve some problems about implications.--Jojo4u (talk) 20:38, 25 March 2015 (UTC)

Defintily! Too many confusions with small man made ditches (without extra structured material) either for example primarily done for water flow or to engrave on terrain the limits of a boundary. In common language the word "ditch" is used as a synonym to many specific features but basically it is "a long narrow excavation dug in the earth".--SHARCRASH (talk) 12:25, 14 May 2022 (UTC)