Altogether, around 10 attempts to change the gulf’s name have been reverted over the past week on OpenStreetMap. Several contributors have contended that OSM should wait for common usage in society to change before making an edit to the main name of the gulf. “OSM’s primary goal is to reflect what people on the ground believe is correct, striving for accuracy and neutrality in the face of diverse perspectives,” says Clifford Snow, a member of the organization’s Data Working Group who has reversed some of the edits allegedly made without consensus.
A similar back-and-forth has played out over Denali. But reaching agreement may wind up proving difficult. “I do not believe that OSM will ever be able to pick one [name], without offending some user somewhere,” one contributor wrote. “We need a path out of this quagmire that does not involve edit wars.”
Other contributors discussed when it would be appropriate to make the changes. Mapping providers, including Google, say they follow the US Geological Survey’s Geographic Names Information System (GNIS), but that database hasn’t been updated with the new names yet. Department of Interior spokesperson Elizabeth Peace declined to speculate about when USGS staff might get around to processing the updates.
Under a 1947 law, decisions about which geographic names the US government will use are to be made by the secretary of the interior and the Board on Geographic Names, or BGN, a panel of officials from a smattering of government agencies. The GNIS is a repository of BGN-approved names.
As of Tuesday, at least one listed member of the BGN had received no correspondence or records related to changing the name of the gulf, according to a request filed by WIRED under the Freedom of Information Act. That suggests either that the usual mechanisms have not been engaged, or that some other authority is being exercised to change the official name. The Interior Department spokesperson declined to comment.
Another point of uncertainty has been whether the entire gulf should be renamed. The president’s order addressed “the U.S. Continental Shelf area bounded on the northeast, north, and northwest by the States of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and extending to the seaward boundary with Mexico and Cuba.”
But as one contributor on OpenStreetMap wrote, “the Gulf of Mexico is much bigger than this. So it seems rather than a renaming, this executive order is creating a new name for a sub area of the Gulf of Mexico.”
The White House didn’t respond to WIRED’s request to clarify the intended boundaries for the new name. If the change were to apply to any non-US territory, the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency would have to update what’s known as the Geographic Names Server, a database of names for foreign locations. The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency declined to comment.
Mikel Maron, a spokesperson for the OpenStreetMap Foundation, which helps steward the volunteer efforts, says the debate over the Trump order highlights the value of having an open community trying to represent the complexity of the world. For now, their discussion continues. “Ultimately the OSM Foundation Data Working Group has stepped in to put a hold on any big changes in the OSM database until things are more clear,” he says.
Snow, the working group member, says the trending consensus is leaving the Gulf of Mexico and Denali as the primary names and adding a label to each for the new official US name. But if Gulf of America catches on, the open source map may have to follow.
Additional reporting by Tim Marchman.
