An automated message is all that people are going to get. It is an automated system. The only humans involved are the BGN members who were ordered to make the change in the first place.
https://mastodonapp.uk/@JdeBP/113988218455822655
The only meaningful act of resistance would be to lobby Google not to source its data from the known-to-be-full-of-junk GNIS in the first place.
It is not going to achieve anything. The only humans involved in this process are on the Board Of Geographic Names, and they are the ones that made this change.
I've found out the details of the original article on Stumptown.
It is _Vermillion County, Indiana History & Families_ by the Vermillion County Historical Society, published in 1990 by Turner Publishing, ISBN 9780938021346. The chapter on Vermillion Township has a 1-and-a-half-page spread on Stumptown starting on page 48.
#geography #Indiana #Stumptown #GNIS #BGN #MakeGeographyAccurateAgain
Here's a computing history factoid:
The U.S.A. didn't delete all of the accents, diacritics, and suchlike from its placenames in the late 20th century because of spelling reform zealotry.
It did so because the BGN's new Geographic Names Information System was stored in data files that were encoded in EBCDIC, which lacked the characters that the existing names used.
They actually planned to fix it up, but the whole three phases roadmap for the GNIS got knocked sideways when Congress curtailed the funding a decade or so in.
Yes, *not* ASCII.
#GoogleMaps is not reliable and never has been.
This is an opportunity I hope for people to learn how the sausage is made.
Google Maps gets its information from government databases such as the U.S.A.'s Geographic Names Information System (#GNIS). #DonaldJTrump just ordered the GNIS database records to be changed.
All of those WWW sites like RoadsideThoughts and *many* others (showing things like "hotels near $NAMEYOUTYPED") do exactly the same.
So Google Maps and RoadsideThoughts et al. are just going to follow the GNIS changes. No complaining is going to affect this, as it's all automated. (There are no human beings involved at all in the RoadsideThoughts et al. automated WWW sites.)
The problem is that this is far from the only problem with the source data. OpenStreetMap people know all too well the *huge* problems with the GNIS data. They have a big article about it on their wiki. The data are vastly erroneous.
There is more to it than that, though. It is well known in the OSM world that the #GNIS is massively erroneous, and it is only the GNIS that #DonaldJTrump has ordered changed. It is a single name change in what is *already* a vastly unreliable source.
It is high time that the on-line maps companies learned what OpenStreetMap learned a few years ago: It is the #GNIS that people should be throwing out. This is an opportunity to highlight that it simply is not any good, in a huge way.
If we are going to have a #MakeGeographyAccurateAgain movement, can we just bite the bullet and throw out the USBGN and the Geographic Names Information System in toto? Then we won't have to care what presidents of the U.S.A. order to be put into it. It is a total bag of shite, chock full of uncorrected entries for places that no longer exist. A mis-named Gulf is ironically one drop in an ocean of errors.
For example, this is supposedly Stumptown in Parke county, Indiana:
https://edits.nationalmap.gov/apps/gaz-domestic/public/search/names/452147
It's not. Stumptown was in Vermillion county just off SR71 north of Dana, and was demolished in 1942. Per the Indiana Historical Society.
Google changed the Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America. It would be just a total shame if we all flooded Google with feedback telling them the Gulf is labeled incorrectly.
Open Google Maps, zoom out and center on the Gulf of Mexico. Click on your photo in the upper right. Select Help & Feedback. Select Send Product Feedback. Report an issue. Tell them the Gulf of Mexico is labeled incorrectly.
Spread this far and wide! #MakeGeographyAccurateAgain
