Properly mapping dry washes

General talk Tagging general discussion
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For the area features we’re talking about I am preferring the tag natural=wadi over natural=wash for a few reasons:

  • wash is more likely to be mistranslated from English into something to do with cleaning in other languages (e.g. “lavar” in Spanish). I’ve not tried the auto-translate in these forums, but Google translate messes this up.

  • wadi is easier to search for. Googling for “wadi” brings up results related to the landform. Googling “wash” on the other hand brings up hundreds of results for a variety of things that aren’t the land-form – everything from laundry to hair to sanitation.

  • wadi is used in a wider swath of the world across at least north Africa and the middle east, whereas wash is only used in American English in the south west US region.

    As someone from the very wet US north east I wouldn’t know what a “wash” was without having traveled to the south west. Without significant context most American English speakers would not identify the term.

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