Last week, the U.S. federal government finally agreed to retire a number of racially insensitive names of landforms and bodies of water in Texas, 30 years after the state legislature petitioned the federal government to rename them after accomplished Black Texans. (Most of them had originally been named with an even worse racial slur.) OpenStreetMap has been updated to reflect the new names that are in GNIS, the federal government’s official gazetteer. The corresponding Wikidata items have also been added or updated, to prevent data consumers from overriding OSM names with the offensive old names, but also to link to more information in Wikidata and Wikipedia about the person whom the feature now commemorates.

Most of the features had to be mapped for the first time, because GNIS doesn’t have enough detail about linear features like valleys and creeks to import them, and NHD had only been imported in a few parts of the state. Except for Emancipation Pond, which is in a residential development under construction, a traveler is unlikely to ever stumble upon these remote features in the vast Texas landscape. Even so, much more accessible locations get renamed practically every day. Hopefully these OSM and Wikidata entries will serve as a handy model for mappers to follow as we find more efficient ways to track and respond to name changes.