[Tagging] wikipedia links and copy + paste in tag definitions

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

A lot of tag definitions sooner or later get a wikipedia link to an article (typically with the same name as the tag) attached to their beginning and/or the first paragraph(s) are copied to the definition.

I'm sure people are acting in good faith when doing it, but I don't think it's helpful. Wikipedia articles have a different scope, and quite often there are several articles in WP for what in OSM is tagged with the same tag, and sometimes we have multiple tags in OSM each covering a specific aspect or subtype of what is covered by a single WP article.

One recent example is the linking of the WP article castle from the osm tag castle, where our tag covers much more than just medieval fortified residences in Europe and the middle east (e.g. what in WP is described under chateau, or the Japanese Shiros and Russian Kremlins), but there are countless others.

Please do not do it. Don't link to WP, especially not in the beginning (as if their definition automatically was equal to ours), because even if the current state is fine, we don't control WP and don't know how they will structure their lemmas in the future. If you copy definitions from WP, check very well if all parts that you copy are describing the actual meaning of the OSM tag, and add missing aspects or those that might not fit for this specific WP article but that are essential for the documentation of the OSM tag.

Cheers,
Martin 

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