On 5/22/15 16:07, Mike Connor wrote:
The world is a messy, complicated place. This is not the first or the last
time we'll be faced with conflict over various types of recognition. In my
time with the project, we've faced calls to remove and disavow entire
localizations, such as Macedonian and Kurdish, on similar
political/nationalist grounds. In general, we should steer clear of
politics outside of issues clearly tied to the Mozilla mission. To me,
that means we should be permissive, not prescriptive. To do otherwise
feels unnecessarily exclusionary.
Like Tim, I don't believe it makes sense to rely exclusively on ISO-3166.
All lists have inherent bias, and as a result crisp compliance with a
standard will inevitably be out of date (South Sudan) or create unnecessary
tension (i.e. Kosovo is neither Albanian or Serbian). We gain nothing by
passing the buck, and risk alienating members of our community in the
process.
I really like the FreeBSD policy, which aims to avoid sovereignty arguments.
http://www.freebsd.org/internal/i18n.html
The FreeBSD policy skirts the Kosovo issue in exactly the same way as I
proposed earlier: it punts the question as to whether to include it in
the list to ISO.
And the only issue with South Sudan is that Mozilla hasn't kept up with
the ISO list. South Sudan has been part of the official ISO list for a
long while. The error here is on Mozilla's part, and I support
rectifying that as soon as possible.
The FreeBSD policy boils down to two key points:
1. Don't call the things defined in ISO3166-1 "countries" -- call them
"countries or regions", and
2. Modify the official names for ISO codes when the official names are
controversial and a less controversial alternative is available.
I don't find anything in there to disagree with. I think it's a good policy.
But it doesn't support your argument that we should use a modified
version of ISO3166-1. That is delving quite squarely into, as you put
it, "politics outside of issues clearly tied to the Mozilla mission."
--
Adam Roach
Principal Platform Engineer
[email protected]
+1 650 903 0800 x863
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