Verifiability is critical to OSM success, but it does not mean it must only be verifiable by visiting the physical location. Tags like "wikipedia", "wikidata", "url", "website" and some IDs cannot be verified that way. You must visit some external website to validate. Stopping by Yellowstone National Park or a statue in the middle of a city may tell you its national registration number, but most likely you will have to visit some government website. Seeing some complex URL tells you nothing about its correctness unless you visit that web site.
Yet, we are not talking about the last two examples. Node 153699914 has wikipedia="Eureka, Wisconsin". It looks fine to a casual examiner, but in reality is a garbage link to a disambiguation place - a list of 3 different places, which you wouldn't know unless you visit the external site - Wikipedia. I have uncovered many thousands of such cases, and many of them have already been fixed thanks to a stronger IDing system. Yet, every day there is more of them - because Wikipedia keeps renaming things, and several people refuse to allow Wikidata IDs. Wikipedia created a stable ID system for these pages. Its called Wikidata. Please view Wikidata as first and foremost a linking system to Wikipedia articles. It is NOT perfect. It has many issues. But it is simply much better than linking to Wikipedia articles by their names because they don't break as often. Andy, you keep saying Wikidata is not verifiable data - but that's because you keep insisting on separating it from Wikipedia. We can already make it so that when you click on Wikidata link, you are taken directly to Wikipedia. The statements on Wikidata entries are a major bonus for automated verification and other things, but it should be viewed in addition to the redirecting capability, not as a replacement to Wikipedia pages.
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