The tag alias #46290 telephone_pole -> utility_pole has been approved.

Reason: One of the alternative names of a utility pole

EDIT: The tag alias telephone_pole -> utility_pole (forum #290210) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.

No. Not all utility poles are telephone poles and a lot of them are transformer poles. Depends on the place youre in and what theyre being used for.

demesejha said:
No. Not all utility poles are telephone poles and a lot of them are transformer poles. Depends on the place youre in and what theyre being used for.

Can you clarify? What difference is there?

furrin_gok said:
Can you clarify? What difference is there?

Generally speaking think about them in the three section method.

http://www.annsgarden.com/poles/JP1-Allocation0.jpg

An electrical pole, and electrical pylons only have the top wire.

Utility poles have both the Wires on the top and a transformer, and can also have the communication wires.

A telephone pole only has the very thick communication wires and no transformer but can have transmission nodes.

A telephone pole can also have the thick communication wires and electrical but no transformer and can often have, especially older ones, direct access for maintenance.

Its also far more complicated than this but the appearances can vary wildly. Telephone poles never have transformers, they are also usually less thick than utility poles bc utility poles are more top heavy which means they need to be thicker or they would tip over time.

demesejha said:
Generally speaking think about them in the three section method.

http://www.annsgarden.com/poles/JP1-Allocation0.jpg

An electrical pole, and electrical pylons only have the top wire.

Utility poles have both the Wires on the top and a transformer, and can also have the communication wires.

A telephone pole only has the very thick communication wires and no transformer but can have transmission nodes.

A telephone pole can also have the thick communication wires and electrical but no transformer and can often have, especially older ones, direct access for maintenance.

Its also far more complicated than this but the appearances can vary wildly. Telephone poles never have transformers, they are also usually less thick than utility poles bc utility poles are more top heavy which means they need to be thicker or they would tip over time.

I'm not sure how important it is to separate that. I would have just tagged all three as telephone pole, myself.

To have multiple different tags for big sticks/poles with wires running out of them... won't that just make people that are (for whatever odd reason) searching for such a thing miss some because they chose the wrong word, when to the layman they are completely interchangeable terms anyway? Before today I'd never had someone go "that's actually not a telephone pole, it's a utility pole" where I saw it lol... this is a furry board, after all, not an electrician's board. 🦊

Tl;dr, I'm with OP.

furrin_gok said:
I'm not sure how important it is to separate that. I would have just tagged all three as telephone pole, myself.

Yeah, I'm sure an electrician would say differently, but I can't distinguish apart each of the types of poles. The unused tags electric_pole/electric_pylon could also be preemptively aliased to utility_pole to avoid future mistagging, since those seem to also fall under the 'generalized utility poles' category and could be mistagged by newer inexperienced users.

demesejha said:
No. Not all utility poles are telephone poles and a lot of them are transformer poles. Depends on the place youre in and what theyre being used for.

Your wording's going to get a lot of people lost, did you mean to say Not all telephone poles are utility poles?

I think I need more information, but this is certainly better than having it alias toward telephone_pole, as that would be blatantly incorrect in a lot of cases even if it's colloquial usage.

magnuseffect said:
Your wording's going to get a lot of people lost, did you mean to say Not all telephone poles are utility poles?

I think I need more information, but this is certainly better than having it alias toward telephone_pole, as that would be blatantly incorrect in a lot of cases even if it's colloquial usage.

Yeah my bad! Sorry.

g273435d said:
The tag alias #46290 telephone_pole -> utility_pole has been approved.

Reason: One of the alternative names of a utility pole

After reading everyone's thoughts about this, I suppose it would make most sense to have it aliased this way, as well as the other types of utility poles. The wiki should also reflect that the tag utility pole now is all inclusive to telephone poles, power lines, etc.

The tag alias telephone_pole -> utility_pole (forum #290210) has been approved by @Rainbow_Dash.