I somehow missed looking at the main building wiki page, focusing on the subarticles. As Blake rightly pointed out at the tagging list:
"In addition outlines can either be simplified shapes or very detailed outlines which conform accurately to the shape of the building. It is not uncommon for buildings to initially be described as simple group outlines later be improved with more detailed outlines and to be split into individual properties." http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Buildings This seemed to be majority opinion at tagging too: it is OK to trace a rough building outline. But preferably not because the mapper has no time (in that case, just map the residential area), only if it is really hard to tell where one building stops and the other starts. One reason to avoid as much as possible is that several data consumers (optimistically) assume one building polygon means one actual building.
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