Gulf of America - Gulf of Mexico
community.openstreetmap.org
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:
  • infeeeee@lemm.eeEnglish
    62·
    19 hours ago

    OSM exists to record and map facts, not to dictate them. If some people call it that way, than it should be recorded in the database, it’s not about personal preferences and politics, we shouldn’t decide if the name is right or not. If you read the linked forum thread you can see that it is purely technical, about how we should record it in the database and when (now vs when and if it will become official)

    It’s a bit annoying here that a lot of people misunderstands this, and comments recommendations with near zero osm mapping experience, this is about how to map a thing on OpenStreetMap, not about politics.

    • Classy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      6 hours ago

      I could imagine Trump deciding that a random bird needed to be named after himself, and inaturalist having a forum discussion about localization etc. It’s probably the same kind of debate here

    • ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      7 hours ago

      How does OSM deal with Arabian Gulf / Persian Gulf? I’ve only ever seen it referred to by the latter name by western sources but only the former name in Arabic over here.

      I’m well aware that the name “declaration” of Arabian Gulf was a political move in the 20th century, but I’ve never seen the name Persian Gulf in Arabic. Never.

      Just curious.

      • infeeeee@lemm.eeEnglish
        2·
        5 hours ago

        See it yourself, this is the gulf relation: https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/9326283

        It has more than 90 names, on different languages. As I can see the default name key without a language subkey is the same as name:ar which is the Arabic name, so that’s the “default”. There is also an alt_name:ar as “alternative name” and google translate says it means “Gulf of Basra” which should be coming from the city of Basra, in Iraq (OSM).

        In Persian the same 2 keys exist. The default name:fa translates to Persian Gulf, the alt_name:fa is Arabian Gulf

        It’s important to note that the language independent name tag is not used the same way everywhere. E.g. here they use the Arabic name, but for example for the Danube river this default is “Danube” in English, while for example this section where it’s the border between Slovakia and Hungary its name is “Dunaj / Duna”, containing names in both languages. Similar here, but Romanian and Bulgarian names “Dunav/Dunărea”: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/42369355

        This tagging scheme is also common for example in Alto Adige/Südtirol (OSM) a region of Italy where 70% of the population is native German speaker, they add both names, and you can see this on the default Mapnik layer on openstreetmap.org

        OpenStreetMap is a database, and the map you see on openstreetmap.org is just one renderer, a lot others exist. If you want to see everything rendered in another language you can use for example on Wikimedia Maps, in this url just change the language code at the end to something else, e.g. this is in German: https://maps.wikimedia.org/?lang=de This is in Italian: https://maps.wikimedia.org/?lang=it

      • yo_scottie_oh@lemmy.mlEnglish
        1·
        6 hours ago

        Check the community discussion thread (linked in the OP). I’m not sure they cover the Persian/Arabian Gulf specifically, but in general terms your question is likely answered in that thread.

        TL;DR: There are various tags, prefixes, suffixes, whole nine yards for documenting all the different types of names.