Lol, I keep spelling the wrong ‘gulf’ :P
For real though, now that the USA is listed as a sensitive country by Google, maybe it would be best if iNat just used the standard international Google Maps rather than the US version?
9 Likes
If iNat truly aims at adressing a global community, I strongly suggest to display the “global” version of Google Maps rather than the US version, at least for users accessing iNat from outside the US.
14 Likes
I apologize. What I wrote didn’t communicate what I meant. A lot of really bad things are happening right now. We’d like to fix them all. I think we need to go after the most consequential bad things and not get distracted by the others, bad though they are. (I’m amazed and disappointed that anybody is changing their maps to Gulf of America.)
8 Likes
Is there anything further to discuss after:
I would expand that suggestion by removing the part about “at least for users accessing iNat from outside the US.” I suggest using the global version for everyone. Because as @earthknight pointed out, “[the name change] is not for most of us from the US either.” I think that is quite clear from the fact that nobody has posted to this thread in favor of the change.
Now that we have a clear suggestion for a solution, will it happen? Or will it have to go through the whole process of being made a feature request, voted on, and all of that?
10 Likes
I hid some other comments and I removed the top part of @jasonhernandez74’s post as it was off-topic and there have already been two posts here from me with staff colors asking for the topic to be restricted to Google Maps and what’s shown on iNat. Anyone is free to look at the edit history of the post if they want. But this forum is not going to become a place for people to make a lot of complaints about things that aren’t related to iNat. It’s not constructive, and there plenty of places online to discuss politics. If you want to effect change, I recommend reaching out to your political representatives and/or support and volunteer for organizations that are advancing the causes you are interested in. Complaining on the iNaturalist Forum is not going to change the overall political situation.
I don’t think anyone on the iNat side said that changing it was technically possible. If they have, please cite it. @pisum helpfully provided some possible solutions, but he doesn’t represent iNaturalist. As I said above, we’re investigating it, please be patient. It’s not necessearily as easy as flipping a switch.
It’s also not clear to me what the “global version” means. As has been noted a few times, Google Maps shows different maps for different countries. Is there a single “global” version of it? I honestly don’t know, but if it was possible I’d be for using it.
11 Likes
As I said earlier, while I believe it’s silly in general to change historically accepted names of places, organisms, or anything else for ideological reasons, it really isn’t worth the effort to change the site imo. In the long run does it really make a difference what name is displayed for that particular gulf on the inat map?
My opinion is that it doesn’t make enough difference to put the existence of iNat in jeopardy (iNat being a U.S. website).
Well as inat isn’t a government affiliated site I don’t think that really makes a difference. A privately owned site can call it whatever it wants. Just not worth the effort of trying to change it imo, considering that the map is linked to Google Maps which isn’t controlled by inat
I was assuming that iNat has a tax-exempt status, which does involve government.
My understanding is that place names in the US are officially determined by the US Board on Geographic Names. I haven’t been following this name change closely enough to know whether this was actually their decision. Either way, it’ll always be the Gulf of Mexico to me.
2 Likes
there is a base version of Google Maps, and i think it’s basically what we see in maps on the iNat website currently. you can also see the base version if you don’t select a region in this localization demo for Google Maps: https://developers-dot-devsite-v2-prod.appspot.com/maps/documentation/javascript/demos/localization.
more information about localization options in the Google Maps API is available here, in case folks really want to dig into the nuts and bolts of it: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/localization
actually making the request for regionally localized data doesn’t seem like it’ll be the hard part. as noted earlier, the hard part probably is implementing a way to determine which is the correct region localization appropriate for any given user. the easiest but least robust version of this is probably to apply a blanket region per affiliate site. trying to do it by user or user session is more robust but comes with tradeoffs.
4 Likes
Thanks!
1 Like
Yeah, I agree with the idea behind this approach. We ought to have some sort of consistent naming that is independent of geography. Obviously, we have different languages, but within a given language, it’s useful to have some level of place name consistency, similar to how we use scientific names for taxa in part because they offer a consistency that common names lack.
In the meantime, given that basically no one uses the name “Gulf of America” except to score political points, I’ll continue to call this body of water the Gulf of Mexico, as it has been and as it still is known.
5 Likes
Evidently, the name was officially changed via the prescribed procedure. Following is a quote from USGS: National Map that is displayed on that page as of the time of this writing (February 11, 2025, 7:32 PM EST):
Per Secretarial Order 3423, the Gulf of Mexico has been renamed to the Gulf of America. The display map for the Gazetteer application is in the process of being updated to reflect this name change.
So, whether or not we view it is a good decision, it does appear to be official.
2 Likes
We did some digging and iNat was using the locale of one’s browser to localize maps. We made an update that now uses your account locale (the one you can choose in Account Settings or at the locale picker in the footer) for map localization and I think do see some changes. If I chooseEspañol (Mexico) I see this:
If I choose English (UK) I see this:
The other languages I’ve tried, English, French, German, Español and Japanese only show Gulf of America.
I’m going to close this topic for a few days. People are still making off-topic posts that are not constructive, and I think it would be prudent to see what things are like in a few days once Google’s updates are fully rolled out and we have some time to do a little more digging about a potential global map default.
23 Likes
This topic was automatically opened after 2 days.
Huh? Why is this topic open again?
1 Like