Hi,
It has come to my attention that someone apparently has added a node for the nonexistent continent of “Americas” to OpenStreetMap. This is causing a ripple effect across routing apps.
I opened a note about this, and I was suggested to discuss here:
A note in the same area notes that there is likely no consensus for this change:
What should I do now? I am a CoMaps user and this really irks me.
For what it’s worth, there’s no consensus in the real world that North and South America are continents either. There was a lengthy discussion about how to model this continent of continents a little while back:
Hi
A link to the node in question would be helpful and also, if you find the CS that created it, a comment in that CS to get the person involved that is responsible
Link to the node to save everyone else from searching:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/12852227142#map=4/
It was added about a year ago, originally with only name and name:es tags. Since then other mappers have added further name:xx tags, and the main name tag has changed a few times (America, América, The Americas).
What effect are you referring to - is it just the label displayed when zoomed out?
This is what I see in CoMaps (with map language set to Spanish). It seems reasonable in that each of the 3 labels refers to something considered “a continent” by large numbers of people.
In any case, that is the last zoom level where I see the continent labels - just beyond this zoom they are replaced by country labels, so I’d probably never have noticed it if not for this thread.
Likewise, OpenMapTiles includes place=continent points at the very lowest zoom level, which is quite out of the way. In OpenStreetMap Americana, you’d have to make the map tiny just to see it. I don’t know if anyone really considers these labels to be definitive statements about the number of continents. After all, OMT has the North/South Atlantic/Pacific too, though not the Atlantic and Pacific as a whole.
For the name:en=* tag, I would’ve intuitively expected “The Americas”, similar to “The Gambia” and “The Hague”. But we aren’t very consistent anyways. We have “The Bahamas” in the local language but only “Bahamas” in English.
I would file issue at CoMaps issue tracker (if not filed already) asking them to stop rendering place=continent or to render it from custom data if it is somehow wanted
here there is no real benefit to using OSM data
It would be nice if you would close your note as duplicate of the older one.
It would be even nicer if you would accept that your point of view is not the only one around the world 
. As @alan_gr wrote:
And maybe if you follow the advice of @Mateusz_Konieczny , you would get in CoMaps what you want.
Are CoMaps actually doing anything wrong here? They’re showing valid data (valid at least for some people).
While you could suggest that CoMaps adopt the concept of a “worldview”, and take that into account when creating maps, but that would be an awful lot of work for basically no benefit to them.
A consumer-facing application would benefit more from a broader feature that adapts contested boundaries and place names to the user’s worldview. The logic for this feature could make it easier to adapt the continent labels while they’re at it.
(As for the number of oceans, or planets…)
A commercial one, absolutely. A volunteer-made one? Not so much…
One of the commenters in the linked issue made the point that applications can be banned from app stores for not conforming to the expected boundaries, regardless of business model. Fortunately I don’t know of any country that has such strict regulations around the number of continents. Anyways, this is something for the developers to decide based on their own priorities. You could make the case against it in the issue tracker.
America, The Americas is not part of them.
OSM has its logic.
I would say that showing place=continent and place=ocean is a mistake in the first place and I would never show either in map that I would design myself.
(and I would have static data for displaying labels if I would want to display them)
maybe I underestimate how much work would be needed but it would protect against people doing silly edits with place=ocean and place=continent
and these change so rarely that benefit of crowdsourced updates seems tiny (though maybe language labels are worth it?)
but I am not designing CoMaps map style, so they are free to disregard my opinion on that topic
People also do silly edits for countries, states, cities, etc. Continents are of course bigger, but in my experience consumer-facing maps are typically zoomed in so far that you don’t see continent labels anyway.
yes, but getting this data from osm is useful and doing manual label placement for this is quickly getting infeasible
As I see it, place=continent points serve a similar purpose as place=region points and, in some cities, place=neighbourhood points. Laypeople, including people just getting into mapping, aren’t necessarily familiar with the existence of multiple points of view. A mapper in India might search for “Silicon Valley” and expect to get a location back, even though it’s neither a valley nor a real geographical name that anyone can agree on.
Someone searching for “The Carolinas” would be surprised to get an apartment complex clear across the country near Seattle because we lack anything representing North and South Carolina collectively. Likewise, someone reading a news article tagged “the Americas” might be surprised to see an accompanying map of an English garden due to an automated process.
The main value of these elements is to tie the name to a general location. Most maps decline to label place=region because they’re so heterogeneous, but a sophisticated map could pull in external data to figure out which ones to show. An adjustable whitelist of continent elements seems straightforward by comparison.
Can you show us an example of such effect ?
the real disturbing question is why North America is using its English name on a Spanish display
I noticed that but didn’t want to mention it as it’s not really on topic. But as there have been no comments recently it’s probably ok to mention now…
There’s something I don’t quite understand where names in English-speaking countries appear in English even when the map language is set to Spanish or French. It is not just this node, it happens with e.g. Ireland and United Kingdom.
I wonder if my phone language (which is English) also influences the display.
