Talk:Executive Order 14172

Why

Why is this its own article? ChrisletWiki (talk) 01:20, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

@ChrisletWiki: Most executive orders have their own articles. Most don't have as much to say, though. Minh Nguyễn ^💬 04:33, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

So then, by having lots to say on this one, perhaps it’s being used as propaganda, instead of information. ChrisletWiki (talk) 09:22, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

What? 206.204.220.98 (talk) 23:59, 15 February 2025 (UTC)

Naming convention

What is the standard for geographic place names in the article? Sometimes it uses "Quotations" and other time italics. It would be helpful if we could reach a consensus. Cheers, CF-501 Falcon (talk) 23:00, 29 January 2025 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure italics are inappropriate. See MOS:ITALIC, MOS:NOITAL, and MOS:ITAL. GA-RT-22 (talk) 19:58, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

@GA-RT-22, Thank you. I was pretty sure to not use Italics just making sure. CF-501 Falcon (talk) 20:06, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

It could possibly fit under MOS:WORDSASWORDS but my opinion is that it does not. GA-RT-22 (talk) 22:38, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

I would agree with you. I don't think MOS:WAW applies. CF-501 Falcon (talk) 01:57, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

Gulf of America redirect

Gulf of America needs to redirect here, and not to Gulf of Mexico. 46.97.170.199 (talk) 11:03, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

No, Gulf of America refers to the actual gulf. Yeshivish613 (talk) 19:17, 10 February 2025 (UTC)

There is no such thing as a "Gulf of America". The term exists only in the context of this executive order. The name of the actual gulf is "Gulf of Mexico". 46.97.170.73 (talk) 15:38, 17 February 2025 (UTC)

That's not true. According to the US Government, the name of the gulf is Gulf of America. If you look on Google Maps for Gulf of Mexico (while in the US) you won't find it. Yeshivish613 (talk) 19:04, 17 February 2025 (UTC)

Even if Donald Trump was synonymous with the US government, which he isn't, the US government has no authority to arbitrarily and unilaterally rename anything on the planet. 46.97.170.73 (talk) 10:31, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

The US government didnt "unilaterally rename anything". They renamed it for the US alone, and companies such as Google decided to adopt the change, only in the US. Other countries still call it the Gulf of Mexico. 91.196.220.106 (talk) 11:41, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

That's right, so the redirect goes to what is an alternative name in the US. Yeshivish613 (talk) 13:55, 26 February 2025 (UTC)

Again, it's not an alternative name. There is no "Gulf of America" outside of the context of trump's executive order, so the redirect should be to the executive order. Having the redirect go to Gulf of Mexico grants legitimacy to the rename, which is not what an encyclopedia should be doing, as it's a violation of WP:NPOV. 46.97.170.73 (talk) 11:52, 27 February 2025 (UTC)

Missing key details from Sec 4b limiting scope of renamed area

Per Sec 4b, this executive order only renames the section of the Gulf of Mexico over the U.S. continental shelf - effectively the Northern half. This area was first claimed by the US in 1945. OK to add this information and references? JWMcC (talk) 01:53, 13 February 2025 (UTC)

I think it would be appropriate to quote the relevant passage of the order but not to authoritatively state that interpretation. There are factual inconsistencies in the order that we shouldn't be the ones to reconcile. The resulting secretarial order and GNIS and GNS entries make it quite clear that they apply to the whole gulf, all the way to "its southwestern and southern shores in Mexico". The article already acknowledges the view advanced by President Sheinbaum that the U.S. government has no right to extend the name beyond U.S. territorial waters. If you have other reliable sources advancing this view, by all means include them. Minh Nguyễn ^💬 11:01, 13 February 2025 (UTC)

It looks like there is a lot of ongoing work around this topic, I'm going to stay out for now. I re-read the EO and agree that sec 4a and 4b are inconsistent about scope. Thanks for your helpful reply. JWMcC (talk) 00:56, 14 February 2025 (UTC)

Any sources acknowledging that "Gulf of America" doesn't apply to the whole gulf?

It seems like every source is saying that the president "renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America" when, aside from all the other controversy around that, the order to rename seems to expicitely state it's the northern section of the gulf (or just the continental shelf?) enclosed between the coasts of Florida and Texas that's being renamed (see section 4b). It does also imply the Gulf of Mexico name shouldn't be used at all, which I guess leaves the southern two thirds of the gulf nameless? But the actual text of the order does not line up at all with all these map companies and officials and such switching to using GOAmerica for the entire GOMexico, and it's making me wonder if I'm reading an entirely different executive order than everyone else is seeing. Ringtail Raider (talk) 03:40, 17 February 2025 (UTC)

@Ringtail Raider: See the section above. The President doesn't have direct authority to change geographic names. Congress gave the Board on Geographic Names that authority in 43 U.S.C. § 364, so he ordered the Secretary of the Interior to order the board to make the change. Initially, the wording of the executive order caused a lot of confusion and speculation about the scope of the renaming. I participated in that discussion in OpenStreetMap, which was covered in Wired. Later, we found out that Secretary's Order 3423 omits any nuance about a portion of the gulf being renamed. The board's two committees ultimately renamed the whole thing, as described explicitly in both GNIS and GNS. (For instance, the Yucatan Channel doesn't lie within the U.S. continental shelf area.) That said, the private sector can still legally call the Gulf whatever they want or call whatever they want the Gulf of Mexico. Minh Nguyễn ^💬 04:42, 17 February 2025 (UTC)

Any chance i could add talk:Gulf of Mexico to the see also area, just to show what the wikipedians think

thats it, thats literally my qeustion 208.38.236.127 (talk) 22:36, 20 February 2025 (UTC)

If we address Wikipedia's response at all, it would be in the article text and only if the article has something to say about it, since a user can always navigate to the talk page themselves. Gizmodo did cover some of the early discussion on Talk:Gulf of Mexico, but the "Reactions" section has been focusing on a) things that changed and b) statements that were made. I don't really see Wikipedia officially doing either, and there's a higher bar for anything that seems like navel-gazing. Minh Nguyễn ^💬 13:19, 21 February 2025 (UTC)

Requested move 7 April 2025

Executive Order 14172 → 2025 renaming of Denali and the Gulf of Mexico – The proposed title is not one that I am particularly attached to (though it was the best I could come up with). Rather, I am more generally proposing that this article's name be changed away from "Executive Order 14172", based on the WP:CRITERIA for article titles. I ask that editors not cite "consistency" with other executive orders as a reason for opposition, because this RM is opposed to this entire titling convention, not just its use here (though this page is among the worst offenders), and I will seek to challenge the titles of more articles should consensus here work out in my favor.

To begin, this article is not only about Executive Order 14172, but rather also covers the Trump administration's implementation of its efforts to revert the name of Denali to Mount McKinley and to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. There's no WP:COMMONNAME that I could find for this, so I am instead proposing a WP:DESCRIPTIVE title as an alternative. "Executive Order 14172" is almost certainly not the COMMONNAME for this renaming effort. Searching for the title yields very few results:

• The first is an article from The National Law Review. Hilariously, it does not refer to the renaming at all, but rather incorrectly uses "Executive Order 14172" to refer to Trump's executive order on DEI, which is actually Executive Order 14173. Not a great start for the "recognizability" demanded by WP:CRITERIA.
• The second reliable source in the results (and the first to refer to the correct EO) is none other than WEAR-TV, a local ABC News affiliate. And, because a random string of numbers is not at all recognizable, it needs to clarify in that very same sentence that it is referring to the order titled "Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness".
• I would continue with this exercise, but I'm afraid that I've run out of reliable sources. An article from the situationally-reliable WP:NEWSWEEK was the next to show up, on page 3 of Google.

Also listed at WP:CRITERIA is the criterion of "naturalness". Surely no one, except for the very small contingent of people that redirects are designed for, are finding this article by searching for Executive Order 14172. Instead, people search for the Trump administration's "renaming of Denali and the Gulf of Mexico", which is how reliable sources explain the policy (see, e.g., The Guardian, Axios, NBC5, etc.).

And I implore anyone seeking to argue that the current title meets the "recognizability" criterion to ask themselves if they would have noticed if this article was renamed to "Executive Order 14175" (that article points towards Trump's designation of the Houthis as a terrorist organization, an entirely unrelated topic). They likely would not, because not a single person (not even the most politically involved) who sees this article for the first time will have any idea what its title refers to, which is the exact opposite of what an article title should do. DecafPotato (talk) 05:24, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Note: WikiProject Politics, WikiProject Geography, WikiProject Presidents of the United States/Donald Trump task force, WikiProject Presidents of the United States, WikiProject Politics/American politics, WikiProject United States, and WikiProject Law have been notified of this discussion. TarnishedPath^talk 06:38, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

• Oppose, contrary to the reasoning given for the move, the suggested name is not supported by WP:DESCRIPTIVE as the Gulf of Mexico has not been renamed. This is a fantasy in the current US president's mind that they can unilaterally rename international bodies of water. The Gulf of Mexico is the name that the body of water is recognized as being named by the International Hydrographic Organization. It simply has not been renamed as attested by there being zero reporting in reliable secondary sources that the International Hydrographic Organization has done so. TarnishedPath^talk 06:45, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

  Do you think 2025 United States renaming of Denali and the Gulf of Mexico resolves that issue? DecafPotato (talk) 15:13, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

  No, because it still hasn't been renamed. The United States is not in a position to unilateraly decide that it will be renamed. That asside, as others have pointed out, the proposed title isn't consistent with other articles about executive orders. TarnishedPath^talk 00:05, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

I ask that editors not cite "consistency" with other executive orders as a reason for opposition, because this RM is opposed to this entire titling convention Start a discussion at WT:AT. You can't tell editors they're not allowed to cite policy in an RM discussion. voorts (talk/contributions) 12:38, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Oppose There is consistency among executive order articles to use their registered names. Should we rename Executive Order 14151 as "2025 end to DEI in the U.S. federal government" or Executive Order 13989 as "2021 U.S. executive branch guarantee to ethical commitments"? Executive Order 14172 is what initiated the process of changing the mountain and the gulf's name for executive branch purposes (yes, it only ordered them to be changed for executive branch purposes). GN22 (talk) 16:15, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Yes, we should rename the other articles; those are both also hardly recognizable and are uncommon names. DecafPotato (talk) 20:52, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Are you saying we should rename every single article about an executive order on Wikipedia? Funcrunch (talk) 22:07, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

No, I have not read every single article and I am nowhere near prepared to comment on every single article. I'm just saying that we shouldn't treat the current convention — which is unwritten and has never before been discussed — as gospel, and we should consider whether an alternative title better fulfills the WP:CRITERIA. That is, I'm endorsing a case-by-case evaluation of this article. DecafPotato (talk) 23:05, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

I wasn't expecting or implying that you should read every single one of the articles in the category I linked to; I certainly haven't. I was merely demonstrating that it appears that every Wikipedia article about an executive order by a U.S. President is named "Executive Order #####", and that's a large number of articles. Funcrunch (talk) 23:27, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

You haven't explained how your proposed titles meet the other criteria, and as I explained below, I don't believe that they do. If you want to "endors[e] a case-by-case evluation", you need to actually make a case. voorts (talk/contributions) 23:37, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

@DecafPotato: WP:CONSISTENT is a long-standing part of the article title policy. WP:TITLECON states several rationales for that policy:

Title consistency is useful because it makes it easier for readers to find articles on similar subjects by searching with terms or presentation used in article on similar subjects. As a whole, it makes the encyclopedia appear more professional and less haphazard. Having consistent titles also makes it easier for articles to be checked by bots that search for articles by title, and to use certain templates that generate collections of related titles.

You have not advanced a persuasive reason to weight the other AT factors above consistency with every other executive order article on Wikipedia. The titles you're proposing are not the common name for this executive order, concise, or precise because this article is about the executive order and reactions to it. voorts (talk/contributions) 22:36, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

WP:TITLECON doesn't mention executive orders, but it does have a sentence that I think sums up my thoughts here (even if it's relating to a somewhat different topic): Although it would be easy to consistently use the scientific name for every species of plant or animal, this is outweighed by the preference for having the most common, recognizable, and natural name in each case. Yes, consistency is important, and all else equal obviously consistent titles are better than inconsistent ones. But these sorts of titles just aren't recognizable, nor are they used by secondary reliable sources. We don't use WP:OFFICIALNAMEs just because they're official; we use WP:COMMONNAMEs, which "Executive Order XXXXX" is not. If you disagree, then you need to demonstrate why the current title is the common name; if there is no common name, we should be using a WP:NDESC.

The titles also run afoul of WP:NCGAL. Our article for the Inflation Reduction Act is not titled H.R. 5376, because the latter title (even though it could let us consistently name all U.S. laws), isn't common or recognizable. DecafPotato (talk) 22:51, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

The problem is if we use the full title of these executive orders, we get unwieldy long names. And if we try to determine a common name, we get into political issues. For example a lot of people might object to an article named "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government", but if we try to rename it a lot of people might object as well. Note that the full title is a redirect to Executive Order 14168, which IMO is a good compromise. Funcrunch (talk) 23:33, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Executive orders are not similar to the scientific names of common plants and animals. Executive orders are regularly covered in the legal literature, and per WP:COMMONNAME, we prefer more reliable sources (in law, that would be law reviews and journals) over less reliable ones (e.g., newspapers). In any event, the descriptors that the latter sources use tend to be "Trump's immigration executive order" or "the cybersecurity executive order signed by Joe Biden". Those are far too vague to be good article titles.

NDESC isn't relevant here because that policy is about how to neutrally phrase a made-up article title, such as Presidency of Donald Trump rather than the non-neutral Donald Trump regime; it doesn't say that you should invent new article titles when there's a legitimate existing one.

Executive Orders are also not similar to laws, which are almost always referred to by their official names (with rare exceptions, like Obamacare for the Affordable Care Act). Executive Order titles tend to be long, unwieldy, and unused. voorts (talk/contributions) 23:34, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

NDESC doesn't just mean "no possible title"; an existing alternative does not preclude an NDESC if it is deemed a better option. But that's a semantic distinction, so let's use your interpretation. In that case, you need to demonstrate that secondary sources — whether "more reliable" ones or "less reliable" ones — actually use the name you're saying they do, because I can't find evidence of that. You can't handwave that Executive orders are often covered in legal literature without giving actual examples of that being the case. And as far as I can tell we don't decide COMMONNAMEs based on only the most academically rigorous of sources (otherwise we would not have an article named Spanish flu, which is explicitly mentioned in the policy. Indeed, WP:RECOGNIZABILITY states that The title [should be] a name or description of the subject that someone familiar with, although not necessarily an expert in, the subject area will recognize. That's not the case for "Executive Order 14172", so in the absence of a suitable alternative, we can use an NDESC.

But to directly refute your point about legal literature: My searches found no mention of Executive Order 14172 in legal literature, but it is rather recent so I also checked a few others: I found not a single example of legal literature that mentions an EO number without immediately listing its name, (see e.g. this BMJ medical journal article mentioning one of the DEI orders) And by the way, my Google Scholar search for "Executive Order 14172" turned up exactly four results: a KB Law article that is erroneously indexed (it doesn't actually mention the executive order, only just describing the renaming effort), followed by four NOAA (which I would consider an inappropriate primary source for matters of common names relating to the government) sources not related to law at all but only those that mention the EO in a single sentence to explain why they're calling the "Gulf of Mexico" the "Gulf of America".

As I wrote in the initial comment of this RM, reliable news sources also don't use the name; of the two reliable sources that I found referring to "Executive Order 14172", the first, a local news channel, gave the order's title just two words later and never mentioned "14172" again, and the second, a news article from The National Law Review, used "Executive Order 14172" to erroneously refer to Executive Order 14173, the actual topic of the article.

If you can present evidence of reliable sources of any level using "Executive Order 14172" to refer to the order to rename Denali and the Gulf of Mexico, then you have more of an argument. But, at least so far as I have found, those sources do not exist, and they barely exist for the other executive orders I checked either (with the rare exception of the ones relating to the Trump travel ban — numerous successive EOs all with the same goal create a need for that sort of WP:NATDIS). You can't refute the need for an NDESC on the basis of there being a "legitimate existing [title]" when reliable sources don't actually use the name you claim they do. In that sense, we're both just using "made-up" titles, so the one we use should be descriptive and recognizable. DecafPotato (talk) 01:16, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

Oppose. I appreciate DecafPotato's intentions and reasoning. However, determining a NPOV title for executive orders is difficult and controversial, and I think that debating these titles will waste editors time without providing substantial benefit to our readers. From a pure WP:IAR stance, I think Wikipedia will be better off by keeping our existing naming scheme. Daask (talk) 18:40, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Move to Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness, which is much more recognizable, avoids the neutrality issues involved in synthesizing a descriptive title, and would set a pattern that could be consistently applied to other executive orders. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:24, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

So instead of using a simple and easily identifiable means of identifying executive orders (the method most commonly used in high-quality, secondary RSes), we should set a pattern of using titles that are either very vague or could just as easily be the names of think tank reports? Some examples:

• Executive Order 9981 to Establishing the President's Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services
• Executive Order 13166 to Improving Access to Services for Persons with Limited English Proficiency
• Executive Order 12172 to Delegation of authority with respect to entry of certain aliens into the United States
• Executive Order 13765 to Minimizing the Economic Burden of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act Pending Repeal

voorts (talk/contributions) 01:41, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

If the alternative is titles that convey almost no information, then so be it. * Pppery * _{it has begun...} 01:44, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

I would also be fine with renaming this article to the executive order's title, rather than its number DecafPotato (talk) 02:22, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

Oppose. Thanks to the existing redirects, I found this article easily in both DuckDuckGo and Wikipedia searches by searching for "Trump renaming of Gulf of Mexico" and "Trump renaming of Mount Denali". A Google search for the former produced Gulf of Mexico–America naming dispute as a first result, and that article links to this one in the first sentence. I disagree with the argument that the redirects serve only a "very small contingent of people" as the OP states. I think they are adequate for directing people to this article without needing to know the EO number, and therefore there isn't a pressing need to do away with the established (even if unwritten) precedent of naming EO articles by their numbers. Funcrunch (talk) 02:17, 8 April 2025 (UTC)

I did not mean that redirects can serve only a "very small contingent of people", but rather that for those small contingents (such as those searching for this article by its EO number), a redirect could adequately serve them. DecafPotato (talk) 02:23, 8 April 2025 (UTC)