On 13/05/2015 21:06, Fred Wenzel wrote:
On Wed, May 13, 2015 at 9:41 AM, Majken Connor <[email protected]> wrote:
It would be interesting to consider the option of including any and all
country codes and allowing the user to choose. That would also allow
Mozilla to say that it is the individual who is making the political
statement.
I think that is reasonable, however, it's at the core of what is being
debated here. What is the measure for including a country? In the case of
Kosovo, it is *not* a UN member state because it is recognized by 108 UN
member state, but not by the remaining 85, and it is disputed by one.
The comparison to other regions that Adam made are not helpful because they
tend to not have as wide an acceptance, if any at all.
Kosovo is not listed in ISO 3166, albeit in the CIA World Factbook[1] which
takes its list from a US federal information processing standard (FIPS,
meanwhile superseded by GENC)[2].
If we defer to a third party entity, which we probably should, there's a
question which. Our choice of ISO 3166 has left many unhappy because it
pivots on UN membership. For the same reason, the US government issues the
GENC standard which is a superset of ISO 3166.
I took the freedom to diff GENC against our (normalized) region data:
https://gist.github.com/fwenzel/5259ec6ec8b98d90cab1
Not a patch that can land this way, but it outlines pretty well the
problems caused by strict adherence to ISO 3166 and the regions that we
might want to mention in addition to that.
~F
This is all pretty hairy. The Netherlands Antilles has changed status so
often over the course of my (short!) lifetime that I honestly forget
what its statehood status is at this point. Checking wikipedia, it seems
Bonaire, Sint Eustatius and Saba are now part of a single municipality
that's part of the Netherlands (not to be confused with the Kingdom of
The Netherlands, which besides the Netherlands includes 3 other
constituent countries, namely Aruba, St. Maarten and Curaçao - and
citizens of all 4 of these constituent countries share a single
nationality, Dutch).
In other words, neither ISO 3166 nor the GENC are really correct here,
and although the recent past included a lot of changes, there is, to the
best of my knowledge, not as much controversy over the status of these
islands as there is over some of the other examples in this thread.
My point being, I am feeling more and more skeptical about our ability
to have an uncontroversial, 100% correct list at all times. It seems
like a freeform text field would be simpler.
If we're trying to provide people the ability to find others who are
co-located within some margin of error, why not allow people to just
stick a pin on a map and take lat/long information from there, maybe
with a radius to create some anonymity and avoid privacy issues for
those who are concerned about that?
~ Gijs
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