Thank you for changing this! It’s interesting to me that the Google Maps locale for Germany displays only Gulf of America on iNat, while it displayed as Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America) on the actual Google maps site. Do you have any idea why that may be? It would be interesting to know whether people from the UK already saw the double-name before.
Same for me. Luckily that’s the locale I’m using. Like I said, it’s weird that for the other languages it doesn’t work (or at least didn’t 2 days ago), but that seems to be an issue on Google’s part
Down here in Ecuador, it says “Gulf of America.” If I switch to Mexican Spanish, it is “Golfo de México.” In Colombian, Costa Rican or Argentine Spanish, it is “Golfo de México (Golfo de América).” In plain old generic Spanish, it is “Golfo de América.”
As I said above, I closed it for a few days. However, if there’s nothing new to move the discussion forward about what options iNat has, I might close it again. I’ve already hidden one new post that wasn’t on topic. I think probaly the next step would be for us to explore what @pisum linked to.
There are, actually. I just set the filter to a terrestrial taxon because the observations were covering up the name.
The issue is that the name is not correct anywhere outside the US, and it also tied in with the US-data purge topic, I linked to in my original post.
Also, the place names are still all set to “Gulf of Mexico” and I don’t see them changing, so at least having both names makes practical sense. Here’s the map view with observations from the Place “Gulf of Mexico”:
Maybe there could be something like how inat recognizes multiple common names for certain organisms (for example searching “elephant stag beetle” brings up the page for the giant stag beetle). “Gulf of America” and “Gulf of Mexico” could be marked as synonyms when searching for the place name
Places are usually user-generated, which makes this difficult, I think. And duplicates aren’t ideal, especially big ones like this, as they are very demanding on iNat’s infrastructure.
This is generally, why I agree with those who say it’s better if iNat used the standard international map, rather than switching it up for sensitive countries.
Given that this is what tiwane seems to have meant by “what pisum linked to,” it seems the question comes down to what does the “base version” say? And would it work for people using different languages and/or different geographic locales?
remember what i said initially. in G Maps, there are a few different ways to apply localization. it looks like iNat has tried to apply language localization, using iNat’s locales rather than applying your browser’s locales. but this will only get you so far, especially when your language has no locale. (for example, Spanish has no locale, but Spanish-Mexico has a locale.) for the GOM / GOA issue, you really need to apply regional localization rather than just relying on language localization. so i assume regional localization is the thing that iNat staff are looking into.
Does Google decree the name of Deutschland, Nihon or a score of other places described by exonyms? South of Adelaide is a small cape officially called ‘Witton Bluff’, but Google Earth calls it by the French name ‘Cap Stephanie’. Presumably Baudin assigned the French name after Flinders had assigned the English name, but Google cares not for official protocol.
Witton Bluff was probably missing from the map that Google uploaded.
Is there any signage there? You can take a photo of it and add Witton Bluff to Google Maps.
The other option is to talk to your local council and they can contact Google - they might ask for a different name though.
As I said in my flagged comment above, along with some other things: Gulf of the Americas is a name I could potentially support and might be acceptable in any language. But that’s likely not an option.
Hid a few more off-topic posts. I’m going to close this topic until more changes on the iNat end, it’s become a moderation chore and there isn’t much more to be said, I don’t think, until iNat is able to potentially serve up better localized maps depending on network affiliation or locale, which should hopefully display both names for many users. But I don’t think there’s going to be a resolution that satisfies everyone.
