The following bridge is usually referred to as the Merced River Bridge. Officially, the “Bridge” is optional, a minor detail. So can you really “cross the Merced River on the Merced River”? Most would find that unintuitive. Yet this sign relegates “Bridge” to a footnote, and any map that labels this bridge might omit it entirely:
As far as English is concerned, the descriptive word only became part of the name proper fairly recently:
Place naming conventions have also evolved over time. The U.S. Census Bureau still insists on referring to “New York city”, with the lowercase C signaling that the word is optional and only included for maximum precision.
Railroad stations are tricky, because traditionally they were place names in their own right. In much of North America, many stations predate any settlement of appreciable size, historically serving as a projection of the railroads’ economic power. If anything, the disambiguating word would’ve belonged on the settlement rather than the station.
The English Wikipedia’s naming conventions for railroad and other public transit stations requires descriptive words in lowercase, as a nod to this history, but also to avoid naming conflicts with more widely read articles about cities and towns. That’s a constraint we obviously don’t have: our software is perfectly happy to store multiple features with the same name. At the same time, the guidelines also acknowledge that some stations have the descriptive word as part of the name proper.
This mass edit should receive the same scrutiny and discussion that the local community gives any mass edit. If the consensus is that the name=* tags should omit the descriptive suffixes, then the community has significantly more work to do to ensure that data consumers automatically restore the deleted words in contexts that need them.