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The OSM Community discusses the Trump Administration's renaming of "The Gulf of Mexico" to "The Gulf of America"
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this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2025
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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.