Some tags are simply incorrect, such as nodes in the Upper Galilee tagged as in Lebanon and nodes near the Israel-Jordan border tagged as in Egypt.
Other tags may be internationally disputable, such as nodes on the Golan tagged as in Syria and East Jerusalem nodes tagged as in Palestine.
Should anything be done with these tags?
What’s the correct and wise way to handle the potentially disputable tags? Should the “is_in” tags be removed, changed, or kept as-is?
What’s the correct and wise way to handle the non-disputable tags? Should the “is_in” tags be removed, changed, or kept as-is?
In my opinion we should remove this tag if it could be part of a dispute in the future.
I guess those items are part of a import, so I guess nobody will start changing them back anyhow.
From the wiki: “When a region has a well developed set of boundary polygons the information that could be placed in the is_in tag on an object can usually be derived from the boundaries that contain it. In this case, the information in the tag is redundant. Some contributors even go as far as to delete this tag when they see it as equivalent to the boundary information.”
Based on that, we would be justified in deleting even undisputedly correct “is_in” tags.
So we should definitely delete the undisputably incorrect ones, since they are both wrong and redundant. As for the disputable ones, keep in mind that the boundaries are themselves disputable. When the boundaries are unambiguous and stable, I think we should delete “is_in” to avoid redundancy. That is the case with the Golan. However, East Jerusalem is currently marked as being in both Israel and Palestine, and if this is changed someone is likely to revert it. So for East Jerusalem only, I would leave “is_in” in place.
Indeed, the borders between Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon, are based on International agreement and/or UN resolutions. As far as I know, this is not the case for the Golan heights and Eastern Jerusalem.