The OSM Community discusses the Trump Administration's renaming of "The Gulf of Mexico" to "The Gulf of America"
The OSM Community discusses the Trump Administration's renaming of "The Gulf of Mexico" to "The Gulf of America"
President Donald Trump just said during his inauguration that he wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Aside from the political aspects, how does that even work? How does OSM choose a source for that? I’m curious! Also, somebody executed what I thought while I wrote this post:
References
- "Gulf of America - Gulf of Mexico". stillhart. General talk. OpenStreetMap Community Forum. Published: 2025-01-20T17:37:25.493Z. Accessed: 2025-01-21T08:47Z. https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/gulf-of-america-gulf-of-mexico/124571.
- "Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness". The White House. Published: 2025-01-20. Accessed: 2025-01-22T06:59Z. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-names-that-honor-american-greatness/.
- §"Sec. 4"
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Why? There are commisions for that. E.g. the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names (international), the United States Board on Geographic Names (USA) or the Permanent Committee on Geographical Names (UK). Just follow the lead of one of these. There is no need to further complicate stuff.
What the hell is "the ground rule"? Naming is artificially defining things and as that basically arbitrary.
@menemen “on the ground rule”, it means you go there and see what it's being called there. We don't just follow diktats from one office.
How would that even fit here? If the US changes the name there would be two names that fit that description (which isn't uncommon at all tbh).
On osm there is one main attribute
name, and other secondary names likealt_name,loc_name,official_name, etc, and different language versions of all of them e.g.name:en,name:esetc... This is not a political question, but technical, how it should be recorded according to the osm tagging scheme, how this rare situation should be mapped, it's not straightforward. More info in the wiki: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Names