The Rename the World Map
The President has decided that the United States of America will henceforth be known as ‘Trumpland.’ If you were in charge of the world, what names would you give to your favorite locations?
A couple of years ago, I released OpenPlacesMap (blog post link, as the map is no longer live) - an editable world map that let anyone rename locations with a click. The map was hosted on Glitch, so unfortunately it disappeared when that service shut down last year.
Now there’s a new map to edit. Rename World is an interactive map (not by me) that reimagines the editable-map concept, allowing users to propose new names and vote on others’ suggestions. To change the name of a location simply click on its place-name label and click the 'rename' button.
Allowing anyone to edit place-name labels can unfortunately lead to offensive or politically charged names. Rename World tries to mitigate this - not entirely successfully - by allowing registered users to challenge names and vote on proposals. However - there are a lot of racist f~@kers on the internet so you can still expect to be upset by some of the edits on Rename World!
For particularly sensitive map users, Rename World does include a ‘Hide NZ’ button, so you can remove New Zealand from the map entirely if you wish.
Comments
I had no idea OpenPlacesMap existed, sad I missed it. Would love to know how it worked and what you learned from building it. rename.world is CloudFlare hosted 40GB PMTiles, that I had to render on my friend's PC with 256GB RAM. I really like vector maps after all, and I’m probably going to make another map project.
About moderation: there's a basic stopword filter plus a smart dashboard that lets me ban users with all their proposals in a few clicks, or selectively hide individual names. Surprisingly though, spam has been a small percentage and most names are actually creative or harmless wordplay after ~40k renamings.
The NZ button is indeed very important.