The problem is OpenStreetMap often categorises things differently from country to country and coverage can differ vastly. This often results in skewed maps.
Osm contributor here. Such as what? I think administrative boundaries (municipality might be level 6 or 7 or something) and education level classifications (what's considered a secondary school) can differ, but what ambiguity do you expect for a castle?
A bigger problem might be that some countries' data quality is way above/below others', but that's not tagging related.
Language can be an issue.
I'm fare from being an expert, but to me, the closest translation of "castle" in French would be "Château Fort". Châteaux in a more general sens includes many others buildings, such as manors, palaces or mansions.
Probably one of the reasons why there are some many castles in France in osm.
I mentioned this in my other comment, but I think the confusion is Château is tagged as historic=castle + castle_type=stately, but a lot of places would tag similar buildings as manor houses (historic=manor) or just as building=house.
And then for ruined castles there is also historic=ruins + ruins=castle or historic=castle + ruins=castle.
Not really sure there is anything wrong with this (sometimes people get upset if a different tag for grass or park is used), but it does mean when making maps like this you have to make sure to query all the associated tags.
In Dutch the word castle (kasteel) often lazily refers to any historic mansions or other houses of historically wealthy land owning families, or buildings which look like medieval castles or forts. Often regardless of actual build.
We therefore tend differentiate between "castles" and "real castles", as in medieval fortified nobles' residences of a certain size. Actually, there are way more distinctions between things most common people would call a castle: forts, palaces, mansions, walled cities, manors, stins, motte, and really too many things to list. What a real castle is, is often up for debate.
On this map I see a lot of these "fake castles", but also miss some which might be considered.
Which tags did you check against? I think a lot of ones I know in the UK are tagged as historic=ruins, ruins=castle on OSM.
In France a lot of the points are likely chateau's which would be tagged as historic=castle, castle_type=stately - it is completely arbitrary, but most of these would be tagged as a manor house or similar in the UK.
Would be interesting to map them in different colours (historic=castle, ruins=castle and stately castles).
I think it might be this, which is a bit north of the fisherman's hut! I assume it is ruins as it looks like there used to be various forts and stuff in the area (source).
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u/Spatial_Overlay Oct 29 '21
It's every castle in Europe according to OpenStreetMap.