[OSM-talk] Was the deletion of Null Island reasonable?

[Andy Townsend]

On 03/01/2022 02:14, Emil Linus Albrecht wrote:
> This is a little outdated, yes, but debate has just sparked in the OSM 
> World Discord server about a deletion of something, some might 
> consider the base of everything: Null Island (Node #9028040143).
>
>

A bit of the history of what happened might provide a bit of context.

The history of the monitoring station can be seen at:

https://map.atownsend.org.uk/maps/osm-deep-history/#/node/3815077900

(I've used that version of the "deep history" so that everyone can 
easily see comments and replies on editors' changesets)

It was originally added as a seamark, then went through various tags 
before becoming established as a "man_made=monitoring_station".  
Occasionally the wikipedia link "en:Null Island" was added and then 
removed.  Fairly regularly it got deleted by people clearing up other 
rubbish that had been added at latitude 0, longitude 0 and then 
reinstated.  In July 2021 it got its own wikipedia page* and shortly 
afterwards the "locality" for "null island" was added as 
https://map.atownsend.org.uk/maps/osm-deep-history/#/node/9028040143 .

More generally, on names:

Normally, names are assigned by locals, although the language used may 
no longer be spoken locally.  Where I live in the UK there's a River 
Ouse (which apparently just means "water" in old Celtic languages) and a 
River Foss (Latin for "ditch").  Sometimes names are more recent - When 
the canal was built between Amsterdam and Haarlem in what is now the 
Netherlands, "Halfweg" was half-way along it.  Someone called it that 
first, but the name stuck, and now everyone calls the village that got 
established there that.

Sometimes names don't stick around - in Chesterfield in the UK the 
"Terminus" was the end of the tram near 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/241925109 .  The name on the nearby 
pub survived the tram by many years, but now only survives as a bowls 
club named after the pub up the road: 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/418090482 .  Everyone called the 
roundabout that https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/816931479 was part of 
"Donkin's Island" ("island" means "roundabout" in 
Chesterfield/Sheffield) for many years - Bryan Donkin was a company that 
had a building with a large sign overlooking it, which has since been 
demolished.  Sheffield's "Hole in the Road" (see 
https://www.thestar.co.uk/news/retro-day-sheffields-hole-road-was-filled-462529 
) was similar - neither name was "official", but pretty much everyone 
used that name exclusively.

"Null island" is a bit like that - someone invented the name (I've no 
idea who myself, but have heard people suggest Natural Earth or Esri), 
and (at least within the "map nerd" community), it's stuck.

The question is - has "Null Island" reached that level of familiarity 
within the world at large?  In order to find out, you'd normally ask the 
locals.  A classic example of this is 
https://web.archive.org/web/20190225133138/http://ma3t.co.uk/euanmills/euanmills/tifd.html 
- someone walked down the A10 in London asking locals where they were.  
Unfortunately, it's difficult to do this in the middle of the Atlantic.  
People who might know are people who maintain the buoy** 
https://www.brest.ird.fr/pirata/pirata_cruises.php , but there's no 
mention of "null island" there, or in the French "what we did on site" 
text in the linked PDF.

Based on that (and unless anyone can dig out more compelling evidence), 
I don't think that the name "Null Island" has "cut through" to the 
general public yet***, although it might do in time.

Best Regards,

Andy ("SomeoneElse" and "SomeoneElse_Revert" in the changeset links above)

* though "The topic of this article may not meet Wikipedia's general 
notability guideline": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul_Buoy .  The 
fact that a verifiable real-world thing is "less notable" than an 
imaginary concept says quite a lot about Wikipedia...

** this was dug out by someone in the Discord channel - thanks!

*** and I'm not convinced that "Bliss Hill" 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2327750884 has either, though you can 
find actual 3rd-party references for the name: 
https://gizmodo.com/no-the-famous-windows-xp-hill-is-not-on-fire-1819845152 
.