Good work Ed! ----- Original Message ----- From: Edward Sevcik To: [email protected] Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2005 8:06 AM Subject: Re: CaveTex: geographic names lists
An interesting experiment: On the query page, for "feature name" enter the word "ni**er." (in this message I have replaced the letter g with stars to prevent automatic email filtering.) Select state: Mississippi. No results returned, although there are many features in Mississippi that used to have this word as part of their traditional names. Recently there has been a movement to remove this word from geographic place names in the USA, and it must have been scrubbed from the current data set. Now enter the feature name "negro" and run the query for Mississippi. Several results appear, including "Dead Negro Slough." Apparently the name changes are pretty cursory in some instances. Now try the same experiment with "ni**er" and select state: Alabama. "Ni**er" returns four results, all with the offending term automatically translated to "negro" (including the "Negro Heel Bar"). However, querying "negro" for Alabama retrieves considerably more records. This seems to indicate that the data sets include a "former name" field which Alabama populates and which Mississippi does not. The search engine queries this field but it does not appear in the results. At 02:54 AM 9/8/2005, [email protected] wrote: This is a USGS website of name lists of geographic locations throughout the U.S. It's an alphabetical list organized by state & contains the geographic name, county & coordinates. http://geonames.usgs.gov/stategaz/index.html John
