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:
As of revision version #85, OpenStreetMap has the following tags for Golfo de México:
Literally no one ever called it “Gulf of America” until January. I appreciate the generally thoughtful conversation on OSM, but there’s no reason that declaration should be taken seriously.
They follow names assigned by https://unstats.un.org/unsd/ungegn/, and use the labels like en_US for official single-country names. While I would much prefer it remain an alt_name, I understand their rational. Ugh.
Literally no one ever called it “Gulf of America” until January. I appreciate the generally thoughtful conversation on OSM, but there’s no reason that declaration should be taken seriously.
The maintainers were doing a good job reverting contributions for a while. Here’s a good example: https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/gulf-of-america-gulf-of-mexico/124571/16
They follow names assigned by https://unstats.un.org/unsd/ungegn/, and use the labels like
en_US
for official single-country names. While I would much prefer it remain analt_name
, I understand their rational. Ugh.