we require that for names that are not in actual use and are worth tagging solely due to their official standing
Though this one may be of such high profile to qualify for some niche subtag.
But it is further confused by fact that it is officially directed to NOT apply to Gulf of Mexico but only to its part - in true xkcd: Sloped Border fashion
So adding it as official_name* to Gulf of Mexico would be wrong and not correct.
Arrrgh.
Considering it’s apparently still newsworthy when someone uses the name at all, I feel pretty strongly that it doesn’t qualify for alt_name:* yet.
What makes you feel it doesn’t qualify?
Regardless of the outcome of this in the future, the name is in use. It is reported in newspapers worldwide, used by the current US president, and used in all sorts of ways online and offline. Most alt_name never even get close to this level of high profile exposure!
Sure, outside of the reporting, most of this is trolling (including Trump), but that is irrelevant. The name exists and is used, even if it ends becoming a tiny aberration limited to 2025. It may be offensive, but it isn’t obscene or otherwise objectionable. All that remains for OpenStreetMap is to put it in a suitable tag. That it is at the very least an alternative name for the Gulf of Mexico in English, is pretty much established. Being newsworthy does not change that.
For what it’s worth, the notion that the order applies to only part of the gulf is just one possible interpretation of the awkwardly worded order, and maybe a little bit of wishful thinking. Months down the line, what will probably matter more for the purpose of official_name:*=* is what the Interior Department and Board on Geographic Names end up actually designating, and what other agencies end up using the name for.[1] Meanwhile, name:*=* hopefully stays above the fray. There’s that wishful thinking again.
Ironically, modeling it as a separate point feature would make it much more prominent than modeling it as a mere tag on the main feature with seven qualifiers hanging off it. Renderers would probably have the two labels collide each other out unpredictably at some zoom levels, potentially preferring the neologism over the internationally accepted name, because we don’t have an established tag for the relative size of a sea. Believe it or not, some renderers might even break the tie alphabetically by accident.
Pssst: GNIS is not the federal government’s only authoritative gazetteer. That would be too easy. ↩︎
Collegue Glassman being part of the DWG and seeing renewed discussion here I reverted the change for now. The discussion is mostly about wether the intended name change is for the whole gulf or only a subset.
Being official is of course no requirement for adding in OSM, I think Glassmann referenced to the unclear extend.
Alt_name:en-US is obscure and very probably has currently no consequences for any data user at all. So I find it a minimal step forward to acknowledge usage by probably a majority who voted for the current president.
Is it time to revisit mapping seas as areas?
Sounds like an excellent Idea, Last week spending an hour just to get all the Adriatic into JOSM bit by bit as else it was timing out with 1200 island, little isles and islets (according AI) just to get 100% verification on a sandbank which outline was mapped twice and twice made inner of the Gulf of… no not that one, the Gulf of Venice and the Adriatic. Oceans do not seem to suffer from this ‘inner’ role tagging need. /OT
I’d also suggest that that is best done in a new thread. There has been some discussion before (here and elsewhere), and there are pros and cons of both approaches. I don’t think that you’ll get a meeting of minds over it, though.
The IHO’s Limits of Oceans and Seas has been frozen in time without any updates since 1953, apparently because Japan and South Korea can’t agree on a name for the sea separating them.
There appears to be a draft for a 4th edition (ca 1998-2002) but it has been stalled since September 2002 S-23 Draft 2002. The GoM is being represented as a subdivision of the NORTH ATLANTIC, as shown in section 1.11. Since the GoM represents a larger area than the USA has any claims over, then we are faced with two possibilities: One being to leave it as-is until the IHO takes action (if any), or subdivide it into a IHO default named area (primarily south and west sections) and a section where the USA has some claims to extended rights (primarily north and east sections).
Where this may get even more confused, is that various NOAA sub-agencies conduct a variety of operations in the GoM. This kind of makes their job excessively difficult if they have to now sub-divide their products to describe two named areas, where previously there was only one. NHC already differentiates tropical storms in the GoM from storms in the Caribbean Sea.
My own hunch is that all eyes will be watching what USGS decides, as they will have any number of cartographic products that will need to be changed. Even this morning, I saw a USGS earthquake report using the Denali name.
So they make things easier, & to please His Trumpness, that should probably be renamed as the Eastern American Ocean, with the Western American Ocean on the other side of the US!
& as they are both vital to American history & security, they would obviously extend, under these names, to the coastlines of Europe & Asia.
So they make things easier, & to please His Trumpness, that should probably be renamed as the Eastern American Ocean, with the Western American Ocean on the other side of the US!
Some NOAA and FAA products already have that division. Aircraft HF radio over the Atlantic is divided into segments based on which shore based station manages the traffic within it.
Posting a general thought on how to resolve this (and several other similar disputed names of navigable waters). My own view is that any government, or international organization, generated name should be stored in OSM. That means that a given point on the globe may have more than one legitimate name. This is something that ultimately the renderer has to make choices, and possibly based on the needs/allegiance of the user needing a map produced. I do not believe that OSM will ever be able to pick one, without offending some user somewhere.
We need a path out of this quagmire that does not involve edit wars. The technical details is something I’ll leave to those with a deeper understanding of the schema, and what might be possible and how.
OT\ Curious how a first post by a new community entrant gets the hidden flag, yet keeps the “This is the first time osm8810 has posted — let’s welcome them to our community!”, and ‘them’ at that. Very inclusive. /OT
en-US means “American English” rather than “United States of America”, doesn’t it? I don’t think there is an official name in American English.
Checking the other use cases of a two-letter country code in names, I think most of them refer to the name in the respective country and not a local variant of the language. E.g. name:zh-Hant-HK or name:fr-CH.
Just to chuck in another example of this sort of thing, Node: Derry/Londonderry (267762522) | OpenStreetMap has both name:en-GB and name:en-IE on it.
Edit: To add a bit more detail - a challenge (with Derry/Londonderry) is that some of the local population would tend to use one name in English and some others the other. “GB” is doing a bit of heavy lifting here because it originates from “Great Britain” (the island, which Northern Ireland isn’t part of) but is used as the ISO country code for the UK (which Northern Ireland currently is). I’m not in the USA, but I get the feeling that even there acceptance of the name “Gulf of America” is not yet universal.
Time will tell whether it gains acceptance (and where it gains acceptance) - whether it will be another freedom fries or more like the North Sea, which was often referred to as the “German Ocean” in English before 1914.
This is the collision I noted earlier between the scheme for dialects and the scheme for geopolitical naming disputes. Since the usage is so far from universal among speakers of American English in the United States, an *_name:en-US of some sort (alternative? official? national?) would be more accurate than a plain name:en-US. The authorities haven’t managed to turn this into a Northern Irish situation yet. alt_name itself is basically nothing more than a list of search keywords, but it doesn’t hurt to further qualify it by language and country.
In case you’re wondering, the feature’s other alt_name comes from Vietnamese: older speakers in the U.S. have a starkly different name for “Mexico” than younger speakers in Vietnam. Vietnam’s education and foreign affairs ministries have still two more official spellings for the country’s name, but so far we haven’t bothered to tag them on this feature.
The Vietnamese Wikipedia recently voted to stop acknowledging most Vietnamese exonyms in favor of more “modern” English or the local language, leaving Wiktionary and OSM responsible for informing people about the exonyms that people actually use in real life.
Ironically, Spanish-language media keeps having to explain why Gulf of America is problematic in English. In Spanish, América refers to the Americas as a whole, not the U.S. specifically. If one didn’t know any better, one would think it’s a gift to Cuba! Of course, this doesn’t justify the attempt to rename the gulf, since the intention is abundantly clear, but it does leave the name vulnerable to others reclaiming it for themselves. A more erudite politician might’ve chosen Gulf of Florida, which at least has a historical basis, dating to around the same time as Gulf of Mexico. But here we are.
A recurring topic in the international telegram group 
I might be alone in this but, certainly in my usage of British English, “America” to refer to the US alone is somewhere between lazy and inaccurate, and were I subbing an article for publication I’d have changed it. I would generally prefer “the States” or “the US”. I’d be mildly interested to know what other British English speakers think.
Can’t offer any scientific evidence…
Ze Germans (being educated with Her Majesty’s English) generally refer to the USA when saying “Amerika”