Of course, anyone can write, but since this "along" has been on the wiki for four years it is quite common that people follow that.

I'm not a native English speaker, but I'm quite sure "along" would be interpreted by most people as parallell or following a line along its long direction. Along it's width would be silly.

I'm not aware of anything requiring it as it was mapped by me. But I know that the length and position of the rapid was stored with my version. Do you intend to restore that data representing the size after the new tagging scheme is in place?
Maybe it is best that you restore it now, because I doubt that you will manually readd everything that you now have removed in a lot of changesets.