Mis-labeled Country

Someone has labeled Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire as the country of the Netherlands.

In fact, although they are part of the kingdom of the Netherlands, each is an independent country.

How can this be corrected as it is showing improperly in all maps using openstreetmap.

I’m sorry if this is not the right place to post this.

Thanks!

John

They look labelled correctly, as constituent countries within the kingdom. What exactly do you think is wrong?

They are not. They depend on the kingdom’s navy and marines for all military tasks. Also, the king formally appoints the island’s governor.

Yes, fully agree that the governor is appointed by the Netherlands just as in Canada the Governor General represents the queen of England.

However, when you select Montreal on a map, it doesn’t say: Montreal, England.

When a city in Aruba is selected, it shows as Eagle Beach, Netherlands as opposed to Eagle Beach, Aruba.

Thanks for responding!

There is no queen of England; she is the queen of United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Since 1982 all constitutional ties between the UK and Canada haven been cut. Canada is as an example not a (pre-Brexit) EC member.

This is not the case for the ABC island in relation to the Netherlands.

Ok, maybe that was a bad example on my part.

But Aruba is a country.
And as in Canada, although the governor is appointed, the prime minister is elected.

Wikipedia:
Aruba is one of the four countries that form the Kingdom of the Netherlands, along with the Netherlands, Curaçao, and Sint Maarten; the citizens of these countries are all Dutch nationals. Aruba has no administrative subdivisions, but, for census purposes, is divided into eight regions. Its capital is Oranjestad.

In which software? Carto-OSM (the default renderer on openstreetmap.org) shows me a beach:

Beach Eagle Beach, J.E. Irausquin Boulevard, Bushiri, Punta Brabo, Aruba, 000001, Netherlands

And Geonames gives:

Eagle Beach , Aruba

Neither are particularly wrong, although it is debatable whether or not the kingdom relation should have the full name Kingdom of the Netherlands rather than just Netherlands.

The Geonames “Eagle Beach, Aruba” is showing it the way it is referred to here in the country and in government documents.

Local government documents never refer to it as the Netherlands.

Google Maps, Apple Maps, Bing Maps etc… all refer to it that way.

But Aruba is part of (the kingdom of) the Netherlands. Just as Wales is part of the United Kingdom. For example, the town Llanfairpwllgwyngyll in Wales:

Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, Isle of Anglesey, Wales, LL61, United Kingdom

Aruba is not a sovereign state (neither are Sint Maarten and Curaçao), it is a dependant territory, so the proper hierarchy of names doesn’t stop at Aruba.

It does look strange that it says Netherlands instead of Kingdom of the Netherlands, but I fear that is a convention of using short names rather than formal ones for sovereign states.

That means they might have a bug. :slight_smile:

Where it gets confusing is when in some applications it shows just the city and then the last part as in: Eagle Beach, Netherlands.

Did you file a bug with those applications? If they do that for cities worldwide (e.g., the US, where leaving out the state means you will get a lot of duplicates) then their search results will invariably be ambiguous.

I think the Kingdom of the Netherlands should be deleted as a relation and the constituent members (e. g. Netherlands, Aruba, Curacao and Bonaire) bumped to AL2. This is how we deal with e. g. Isle of Man or the Channel Islands: they’re possessions of the British Crown and not independent countries, but they do not belong to the United Kingdom. The Kingdom of the Netherlands, despite having “Kingdom” in its name, is comparable to the British Crown: it’s not a country in its own right.