Restrict wikimedia_commons URLs as image=* tag values?

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While it’s true that Wikimedia Commons contains some NSFW content, it is a much more predictable and trustworthy source of images than the Internet writ large. At least there is some degree of moderation to prevent vandalism from persisting too long. Some mappers even trust Commons enough that they expect renderers to display any arbitrary Commons image that appears in a wiki:symbol tag – directly on the map:

When fetching arbitrary content from the Internet, a data consumer doesn’t only have to worry about NSFW content and vandalism. The content can go away at any time, because the host has no way of knowing that it’s being used on OSM and has made no commitment to keeping it online. Commons has a system to track which files are used on OSM so administrators are aware of this usage; they can avoid arbitrarily deleting the image or they can update OSM if they have to delete the image for copyright reasons.

Worse, an arbitrary domain could get squatted and start serving up malware or otherwise violate your privacy. It’s a really bad idea to hotlink this content and load it automatically without the user’s consent.

This is not a theoretical concern. OpenHistoricalMap has customized the OSM frontend to embed the contents of image verbatim in the sidebar when you visit an element’s page. Unfortunately, many of the images tagged in OHM are broken links. The vast majority of the images that still work are from Commons:

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