They’re done this globally apparently. They just got rid of the provincial park option and defaults all government operated nature reserves, of any government, as “state parks”.
Seems very shortsighted and with a disregard for other countries. Extremely confusing move by google.
yea, ‘state park’, as in ‘operated by the state’
I can see why they did this, but its really stupid, especially at a time like this. i’ve reported half a dozen parks.
But “the state” at issue here would be Canada. A provincial park isn’t a state park since we have national parks too and they’re separate entities.
There was no reason to do this other than stay out of Trumps retaliation zone. It is wrong to say operated by the state when it is operated by the province.
My theory is that some asshole at google thought it was soo much to keep track of what every government globally calls their government operated parks and nature reserves, and just wanted a blanket term for it and went for “state park”, with no consideration for how itd piss most countries off.
oh, thats 100% what happened.
“should we vary what these are called by country?”
“ehh, that would cost like $10,000 of developer time around the globe, just standardize it”
No one here is on Trump’s side, so I’m not defending Google, but it is common parlance to refer to the government of a nation as “the state” even when the nation has no states.
Yep. Its not technically wrong to call them state parks, but still fuck’em that is our PROVINCIAL park.
Maybe a small cultural hill we are on right now but we give us enough of these hills and suddenly we lose any semblance of cultural uniqueness.
Oh, 100% agree.
I’m just saying I understand WHAT they were trying to do, even if it stepped on a cultural landmine. As I said, Ive reported about a dozen parks now myself.
half a dozen
Fucking Casual. :-P
I fully expect they’re gonna close my google account based on the amount of work some poor underpaid kid now has to do. I think I got every park in my province - already a herculean feat - and the one next door. It’s a lotta parks. I’m a little crazy.
ooh, hope you did BC too
I keep adding to it, a couple here, a couple there.
Odd, I just looked up a famous national park in the UK and it’s listed as ‘National Park’
Yeah, it’s the regional (sub-National) parks affected.
I see, we don’t have such things over here. Thanks for the explanation.
Canada really needs to develop its technology to get off of oppressive American tech. We need to work with other countries and develop our own tech to combat this. Absolutely insulting. Just a little “oopsie” after over a decade of not having mislabelled parks? The stink is showing.
Open source options exist. We just need more people using OpenStreetMaps and shit.
As much as i try to update OSM with local knowledge, there’s no way to keep OSM reasonably up to date without automation tools.
I’m not sure how OSM can replicate whatever tools google uses to constantly update open/close hours, new/dead businesses, bus stops with schedules, etc.
A government funded utility that utilizes regional GIS and aerial mapping would go a long way. Google’s got the upper hand on directions and traffic reporting though, so that would take more time to make effective. A lot of that is genuinely due to the number of users that exist on the platform though. I think if you tried to implement similar location data analysis for government infrastructure, people would be up in arms at the idea, despite being perfectly happy to provide the same data to Google.
It’s unfortunate that Google is as prevalent a default service as they are, but it’s hard to ignore how good a service they offer, and how long the development period has been to get them there.
Yeah people have to start using OpenMaps more, and OSMAnd app alternative for navigation
Yep! I recently created an account with https://www.openstreetmap.org/ and started mapping my local area. Fuck Google.
I have been using the StreetComplete app that ties to that. It is actually helpful because I noticed some bad information on the local maps that was very easy to correct in the app.
Yeah! StreetComplete is great! They really make it easy to improve the maps. It’s even motivated me to get out and walk more so I can complete the little quests.
Relevant communities:
just scrape the traffic data, it’s what they would do.
The geodata and related open source technology to edit, review, and host it is already available from openstreetmap community
We have. Only it’s not well known, because of Google’s monopoly.
Then let’s start naming them and putting them out there. If they’re just maps but we need guis for apps on these, then it’s a great time to start that process and get developers in on it, preferably open sourced if possible.
My guess is there would be lots of developers willing to work on a project like this to help distance us from America.
Can you please go burn down the White House again?
I’m not seeing this at all.
Provincial Parks in BC are all still called ‘xyz provincial park’.
If you explicitly search for ‘state park’ all the provincial ones come up, but there’s nothing in any of their details mentioning ‘state’ in anyway.
/edit: found it.
It’s subtle, but it’s there.
Mount Robson Park from both search and maps:
They don’t let you specify in the ‘edit suggestion’ what it should be; but they let you add images.
/edit submitted one for every park in BC.
Since we are renaming things, why not abandon the America noun to designate the USA?
That would please millions on Americans from many countries that calls themselves Americans since they are referring to the continent.
Congrats. It’s a lot of parks.
Looks like they have not changed all of them yet
Jesus fucking Christ already!
The orange butt plug and fElon need to keep their fucking hands off Canada.
Example:
The app is showing provincial and national for me. I’m in NS and have a few around the city and they aren’t mislabeled from what I see.🤷🏻♂️
Either I’m the odd one out or they changed it back.Edit: found one, how have you been reporting this?
Just says Park for me?
Man, all these tech giants keep making convenient “mistakes”…
Just the provincial parks? I was about to get out the pitchforks, but if it doesn’t include national parks that seems unrelated to the drama.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the orange utan asked Google to “make a mistake” on purpose, to float the idea and see what would happen.
Just checked and sure enough, nearby provincial parks are labelled ‘State Park’
What?
