Looking for the Pacific Ocean

[SekeRob]

Was curious since the Americana map shows North Pacific and South Pacific and followed your link to the CS which says "removing name= from oceans as per wiki page* " by a mapper who likes to hop the planet. The OSM relation is for some reason linked to the wikipedia in the :eo language, which is, so it says, not an official language. The wiki sphere shows indeed just the N/S names, no central name although the wiki IS headed Pacific Ocean in eo and en. Doubtlessly v74 will be coming in the not too distant future of the OSM relation.

[SomeoneElse (Andy Townsend)]

@ezekielf

As a result of this changeset, OSM Americana currently does not display a label for the Pacific Ocean

Actually, I still do see North Pacific and South Pacific in OSM Americana. The docs suggests that that is coming from OMT and then Natural Earth (at low zooms) or OpenStreetMapData (higher), but the OMT documentation is a little vague about what the ultimate source is (experience would suggest OSM nodes rather than relations, but it’d be nice to see the code).

@SekeRob

The OSM relation is for some reason linked to the wikipedia in the :eo language

“eo” is Esperanto. OSM oceans were afflicted for a while by a pest that insisted on using Esperanto for “international” names. See also here. Their logic was that English shouldn’t have a “special place” in OSM as it was just one language among many, and depending on how you count it may not be the most spoken. However, English does have a special place in “the language of the sea”, mainly for historical reasons.

I used Esperanto in my example as a bit of a joke because of that.

[Mateusz_Konieczny]

@goedegazelle

If website owners decide to switch to OSM then it will be the Carto map that they are going to display. I get really sick of all those astute remarks about Carto not being an end product. Please kid yourself instead of others who don’t own large servers. Not the whole earth is being subsidised. They can’t afford it.

1. Actually, OSM Carto is far from majority use of OSM data I have seen

2. If someone is using free OSMF tile servers it does not mean that they have rights to dictate how map style is designed and we have no obligation to follow their demands

@jidanni I think that I would put more effort into working on getting some of your ideas done rather than making endless parades of feature requests.
Or at least make a bit more higher quality feature requests.
It is better to make one feature request in a correct place, that was not requested before and has not get rejected already than 200 failing this.
Actually it is better to not make feature request than to create duplicate or one in a wrong place or one that is clearly getting rejected.

[ezekielf (Zeke Farwell)]

@SomeoneElse

Actually, I still do see North Pacific and South Pacific in OSM Americana.

Yes, these two labels come from other nodes that have not had their name=* tags removed like the Pacific node has. name=* has also been removed from the Atlantic Ocean node, apparently “following instructions” from the wiki. Guess who added these instructions …

@SomeoneElse

OSM oceans were afflicted for a while by a pest that insisted on using Esperanto for “international” names.

[Matija_Nalis]

@jidanni

What am I going to tell my parents (who are concerned about my map hobby)?

Just tell them Trump has discontinued it.

After all, we’ve always been at war with Oceania, and Euroasia were always our allies! Wait, or was it other way around this month?

@jidanni

And the ones they show on the front of the globe are probably based on the browser language setting or IP location

Maybe 2025 will be year of vector map on OSM.org (which at least might have to ability to solve that political / language problem).

Until then, as noted many times before, OSM is not a map, so neither you nor your parents should depend on it as such.

There admittedly exist several visual debug interface aids to quickly inspect certain aspects of geospatial database consistency (listed under that Layers button on right-hand side of osm.org website), but unless one is well versed OSM editor who is into kinky geodebugging stuff like Carto, they should probably better ignore it. (and if they are, they should really put a checkbox on that “Map data” under Layers to get the full experience, or at least install better-osm-org wrapper)

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You want a OSM-based map that show oceans? Go get one. There are plenty, and some have been suggested above like https://americanamap.org, but there are others like openfreemap.org or (esp. if you prefer GoogleMaps experience) https://www.lokjo.com and many more. And if you can’t make up your mind, there is always https://openwhatevermap.xyz to browse until you find one that strikes your fancy!

[goedegazelle]

@SomeoneElse

However, English does have a special place in “the language of the sea”, mainly for historical reasons.

The international language is Latin.

[SomeoneElse (Andy Townsend)]

@goedegazelle

The international language is Latin.

(apologies if I am fact-checking a joke here, but) I suspect it’s unlikely that one ships’ crew contacts another and says something like “veniam praeter te ad sinistram”

It’s true that Latin was used on old European maps - if you look closely you can spot a couple of mare on this map (as well as some genuine “hic sunt dracones” at the bottom). In the case of the Pacific**, people with knowledge of Latin only came on the scene after people from the west and southwest had already been all around and through it, so Latin isn’t an especially “international” solution here (although I’m sure I’ve also suggested it myself jokingly in the past).

** itself a Latin-derived name of course, applied by those same late-arriving Latin speakers