People using the application will see the new name in U.S., but will see Lake Ontario in Canada. Outside of North America, users will see both names for the lake.
Hi, I work in the map industry. We generally don’t get to decide what names to use for features. We apply what the local official name is (to simplify). That’s why if you’re in country A, feature X might be named something different than if you’re in country B. You can imagine this would (and has) caused many conflicts around the world if we didn’t display the local official name. (Switch your region via VPN and you can see this in action)
If Google renamed it to Gulf of America, no Google didn’t, not really … They just inserted the new official name for that feature according to GNIS.
The Google Maps change does only seems to be visible for people with US IPs. But I assume that Apple Maps, Mapquest, Mapbox, Bing (TIL Bing has a map feature), etc all use GNIS to label features too, right? None of them have changed the name yet. Seems unlikely that all of them would still be out-of-sync with upstream, and let Google drink their milkshake like this.
In fact, the map for the federal government’s Geographic Names Information System database, which informs these changes, still showed Lake Ontario as of Sunday morning, with a note that the maps are “in the process of being updated to reflect this name change.”
Sure looks to me like Google made the change before the basemaps were updated. It’s now 23:40 EDT Sunday, and GNIS still says Lake Ontario…so yeah, I think this is on them. Dear Leader told them to jump, and they rushed to show him how high they could get.
Hi, I work in the map industry. We generally don’t get to decide what names to use for features. We apply what the local official name is (to simplify). That’s why if you’re in country A, feature X might be named something different than if you’re in country B. You can imagine this would (and has) caused many conflicts around the world if we didn’t display the local official name. (Switch your region via VPN and you can see this in action)
If Google renamed it to Gulf of America, no Google didn’t, not really … They just inserted the new official name for that feature according to GNIS.
The Google Maps change does only seems to be visible for people with US IPs. But I assume that Apple Maps, Mapquest, Mapbox, Bing (TIL Bing has a map feature), etc all use GNIS to label features too, right? None of them have changed the name yet. Seems unlikely that all of them would still be out-of-sync with upstream, and let Google drink their milkshake like this.
According to this Wired article:
Sure looks to me like Google made the change before the basemaps were updated. It’s now 23:40 EDT Sunday, and GNIS still says Lake Ontario…so yeah, I think this is on them. Dear Leader told them to jump, and they rushed to show him how high they could get.
Except it’s not official. An executive order means the executive branch has to use that name. Nobody else does.
It is official in the eyes of the US Government. I’m simply explaining why some/most map companies will include the change.
So switch it back, all Nazis must (redacted)
i think that’s a bit of a rash reaction to changing the name of a lake locally