The volunteer cartographers who power the maps on platforms like Facebook, Lyft, and Strava have been intensely debating over the past week about whether to honor US president Donald Trump’s renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. When should they update? Will the change affect all of the gulf, or just the US portion? Should it be reflected for everyone, or only Americans?
These are some of the questions the cartographers have been asking one another. Their discussions and edit wars provide a glimpse into the confusion over what may be one of the first orders of the new Trump administration generating visible changes across the internet.
On OpenStreetMap, a volunteer-run mapping platform that provides cartography data for a number of popular apps, online discussions show some contributors pushed to immediately update the gulf’s name to the Gulf of America. “This isn’t meant as vandalism, but more of starting the discussion,” one user wrote. They tried to make it only the name for English-speaking users, but the change was quickly rolled back by another contributor, who wrote, “Something isn’t renamed just because a president says so.”
The original submitter replied, referring to Trump’s order, “Well, if he utters the idea in passing during a speech, that’s one thing. But signing an EO and moving federal agencies to officially rename it is a vastly different thing. I hope you agree,” replied the original contributor. (They declined to comment beyond their post.)
In an executive order issued last Monday, Trump said that rebranding the gulf would recognize “this flourishing economic resource and its critical importance to our nation’s economy and its people.” He also ordered that Alaska’s tallest mountain, Denali, return to being known as Mount McKinley in recognition of former president William McKinley, whom Trump has said he admires. Critics have written off the moves as “very silly” and “petty.” Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum has said the body will continue to be known as the Gulf of Mexico to the rest of the world.
On Friday, Trump’s Department of Interior announced that the new names had become official and federal agencies needed to update any relevant signage and paperwork. Private companies, however, aren’t required by law to follow suit. But on Monday, Google Maps became the first major mapping provider to publicly announce that it will switch to the new names for US users as soon as the federal government publishes them to a key database. “When official names vary between countries, Maps users see their official local name,” Google wrote. “Everyone in the rest of the world sees both names.”
Disputes over names and boundaries are common in the maps industry, with a number of countries having enacted laws requiring mapmakers to adopt specific titles and borders. Trump’s order, in particular, follows scant public input and is disputed even within the US.
OpenStreetMap has various ways of labeling names. For instance, it’s possible to list Mexico as the colloquial name for the country while also displaying its official name, Estados Unidos Mexicanos, or United Mexican States. Other labels allow for different names to be shown in different countries and languages. Apps that license OpenStreetMap data can choose which of the labels to reflect to their users or add their own naming conventions.
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.