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”
For ducks sake, just because one country wants it to be different doesn’t change how it’s internationally recognized.
There’s nothing to discuss. It’s the Gulf of Mexico, and suggestions to the contrary are to be appropriately dismissed as childish.
Aa a side note, make sure that, no matter what, you find a way to follow “Gulf of” with “Mexico”. It should flow by rote in the hearer’s mind, simply by virtue of the fact that they hear it the correct way when you talk about it.
This is a trivially easy battle to fight. Only use the correct name, and it will be the one that sticks. Using the incorrect name, even to make correct statements about how it’s dumb and childish and not going to be its name going forward, reinforces the lie.
Mexico is the Gulf-of-havin’est thing you ever did see.
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.
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
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.
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
namekey without a language subkey is the same asname:arwhich is the Arabic name, so that’s the “default”. There is also analt_name:aras “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:fatranslates to Persian Gulf, thealt_name:fais Arabian GulfIt’s important to note that the language independent
nametag 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/42369355This 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
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.
I think we should just ignore anything that comes out of this admin to the greatest extent practical. Don’t give them legitimacy.
Legtimacy? The guy won the popular vote. Like it or not, legitimacy there is.
He only won in one country… I’m assuming that the dozen or so non-USians on the web are allowed to use OSM…
Obviously. I’m one of them
Yes…that’s why we call them “Freedom Fries”… riiiight…
The idiot president of one country can call it whatever he wants. But it doesn’t make it internationally recognized.
Do you like the taste of boots better on a rainy day or on a dry, sunny day?
Looking at a map, it would really be best named the Gulf of the Americas.
But otherwise is this reminiscent of Erdoğan’s decree changing the name of Turkey to Turkiye.
A map should show the established name, i.e., the most widely understood designation, the one that enjoys the most consensus, including among specialists, historians, and so on. In a sane world, dictators do not get to wake up one morning and decide to change our maps.
It’s still the Gulf of Mexico.
reminiscent of Erdoğan’s decree changing the name of Turkey to Turkiye.
America doesn’t hold sovereignty over international waters; at least, not without blatant displays of toxic macho force.
Gulf of Mexico. If need be, use and report ONLY the common Spanish name used by regional leaders. Fuck 45.
Different situation, I’d say. You get a say how your own countries, cities, etc get named. No one is forced to accept it, but it’s a matter of international respect to do so.
You don’t get to rename a geographic feature. Much less one that’s outside your borders.
Just call it the Gulf of Mexico and be done with it.
It is a necessary discussion for the OSM project, and it is quite reasonable the way it’s been developing.
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.
Wiki says we should use ISO 639 language codes, but en-us is a BCP 47 code. There is a section about this on the wiki, that we should switch for that standard because of situations like this: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Multilingual_names#Issues
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
Yeah lemme just get on a boat in the Gulf and look for signs showing its name
@Xavienth you’ll find the signs on the land.
Which piece of land do you trust? Plenty of countries lie along the Gulf.
Seems idiotic to me to discuss what some nutter suggested no matter their current job title. Everything in the world has been named already geography wise.
I suggest renaming it the Gulf of How Does This Help Grocery Prices Again?
I think the discussion there is quite reasonable given the circumstances, and
official_name:en-USonce the GNIS updates is the correct way to go until people actually start calling it the new name.what a stupid timeline this is
The problem they are addressing right now is that “Gulf of America” is not an equivalent name, as “Gulf of America” can and will only apply to the waters next to USA states, so it is a regional name, official or regular.
Hmm, right. This makes it somewhat more complicated. If this new name starts being used by many people and organizations, I suppose it would make sense to create a new
place=seaboundary=maritime, but until then it’d be kind of stupid to pollute the map with a new entity just because it’s in the official records.
Wiki says we should use ISO 639 language codes, but en-us is a BCP 47 code. There is a section about this on the wiki, that we should switch for that standard because of situations like this: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Multilingual_names#Issues
Only time I deadname.
It isn’t deadnaming.
I assume you’re joking, which is cool, but just to have the truth visible next to it 👍
Looks like the thread is gone now, what was the discussion like?
To put it simple, they say each country can decide what name to use for where, and that’s what OSM uses as a reference.
What it is called however is not by defined by what the president says alone though, it has to go through the entire government bureaucracy thing.
The thread still works for me.
Oh I see the issue
The link in the post is fine, the link in the post body goes to a “page doesn’t exist or has been deleted” message because of the period at the end
https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/gulf-of-america-gulf-of-mexico/124571
vs.
https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/gulf-of-america-gulf-of-mexico/124571.
Thanks :)
[…] the link in the post body goes to a “page doesn’t exist or has been deleted” message because of the period at the end […]
Ah! Interesting! That’s good to know. I didn’t consider that some Lemmy apps or browser UI’s might not format the Markdown how I’ve been expecting. The correct CommonMark Markdown syntax for plain text links is to do
<uri-inside-angle-brackets>[1]; I’ll change the URL in the post’s body to that format to improve support. Thanks for letting me know! 😊References
- “CommonMark Spec”. John MacFarlane. Version: 0.31.2. Published: 2024-01-28. Accessed: 2025-01-21T01:27Z. https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#autolinks.
- §6.5 (“Autolinks”):
Autolinks are absolute URIs and email addresses inside
<and. They are parsed as links, with the URL or email address as the link label.A URI autolink consists of
<, followed by an absolute URI followed by. It is parsed as a link to the URI, with the URI as the link’s label.An absolute URI, for these purposes, consists of a scheme followed by a colon (
:) followed by zero or more characters other than ASCII control characters, space,<, and. If the URI includes these characters, they must be percent-encoded (e.g.%20for a space).For purposes of this spec, a scheme is any sequence of 2–32 characters beginning with an ASCII letter and followed by any combination of ASCII letters, digits, or the symbols plus (“+”), period (“.”), or hyphen (“-”).
- §6.5 (“Autolinks”):
- “CommonMark Spec”. John MacFarlane. Version: 0.31.2. Published: 2024-01-28. Accessed: 2025-01-21T01:27Z. https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#autolinks.
Looks like the thread is gone now […]
Hrm, I can still see it.
I just checked, and it’s only the link in the post body
It has a period at the end, and so my client opened an error page. I can see it now :)
Call it “The Gulf of Trump” or as a one redditor put it: “the Gulf of Cheaper Eggs”.
Also maybe re-name New Mexico “New America”.
What if it was The Gulf of the Atlantic
