Mekong: "boat=no"

Long sections of Mekong river are currently tagged with “boat=no”.
About 100km before reaching Thailand, a section with “boat=yes” starts at https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/480393184#map=11/20.4267/100.1287 but I think I see some ships loaded with containers on the river even further up towards China on the imagery.
Down the river, that section ends already at https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/432427083#map=10/20.1288/100.2942
Later on when it enters Thailand a second time as way https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/155863817 , there’s again a “boat=yes” tag, also most sections in Northern Laos have “boat=yes”, one without a “boat” tag: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/39977210 .
What’s the current situation on the river?

Hi Bernhard … Im guessing the Mekong was tagged many years ago and by a number of mappers.
IMHO the dilemma is that unless the waterway has a legal restriction, or is generally considered too shallow, then the boat status is really a Yes, by definition. After all, boat size is not defined in OSM.
The Mekong is navigable by some pretty big barges up to Chiang Saen at least, and of course the smaller speedboats ply the river in all sections I have ever see. And I have crossed it many times on my way to Tibet, and there are “boats” to be seen on all sections.
So, I think it would be fair to remove this tag, on all sections of the Mekong, almost to its source. Of course we can be pedantic as I’m sure some areas around the new Chinese dams will have a legal restriction both upstream and down, but I think you will need a pretty good local knowledge to tag these correctly.
Russ.

Another thing to mention is the wiki page has differing definitions across the languages.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:boat

While the English page just mentioned the tag describing the legal access rights for all kind of boats and says there also exists a motorboat key, the German page details the boat key is only for boats without motor.

So as Russ said: boat=no only makes sense where there are legal restrictions to use a boat.

I agree that it would be best to remove these tags unless there is a structure on the waterway nearby which could hint for a restriction. A weir or similar.