this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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The OSM Community discusses the renaming of "The Gulf of Mexico" to "The Gulf of America" (community.openstreetmap.org)
submitted 21 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) by Kalcifer to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 5 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.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

I think we should just ignore anything that comes out of this admin to the greatest extent practical. Don't give them legitimacy.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 12 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 13 hours ago

It is a necessary discussion for the OSM project, and it is quite reasonable the way it's been developing.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 12 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 21 hours ago

Just call it the Gulf of Mexico and be done with it.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

@menemen @Kalcifer OSM follows on the ground rule,. not just what officialdom says!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

What the hell is "the ground rule"? Naming is artificially defining things and as that basically arbitrary.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

@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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 4 points 13 hours ago

On osm there is one main attribute name, and other secondary names like alt_name, loc_name, official_name, etc, and different language versions of all of them e.g. name:en, name:es etc... 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

[–] [email protected] 12 points 19 hours ago

I suggest renaming it the Gulf of How Does This Help Grocery Prices Again?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 20 hours ago (2 children)

I think the discussion there is quite reasonable given the circumstances, and official_name:en-US once the GNIS updates is the correct way to go until people actually start calling it the new name.

what a stupid timeline this is

[–] [email protected] 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

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=sea~~ boundary=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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 9 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Only time I deadname.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

It isn't deadnaming.

I assume you're joking, which is cool, but just to have the truth visible next to it 👍

[–] [email protected] 5 points 20 hours ago (3 children)

Looks like the thread is gone now, what was the discussion like?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

The thread still works for me.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (1 children)

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 :)

[–] Kalcifer 5 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

[…] 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

  1. "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. %20 for 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 (“-”).

[–] Kalcifer 4 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Looks like the thread is gone now […]

Hrm, I can still see it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 20 hours ago

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 :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

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".

[–] [email protected] -2 points 17 hours ago

What if it was The Gulf of the Atlantic