dw_biz | [RFC] Country list for specifying location

[RFC] Country list for specifying location

So, one of the things people bring up to us sometimes is that our country list -- used, for example, for setting your Location on the Edit Profile page -- is out of date. Which is absolutely true, and we admit it freely: the list is, more-or-less, the initial list of countries from 1998 when

brad was creating LiveJournal, tweaked only slightly. There have been times in the intervening 15 years (oh God, it has been 15 years) whenever people reported countries having been created, renamed, or merged with others, but the updates were haphazard. Adding to the problem is the fact that national and geopolitical identity is often contentious, and is extremely personal. We don't want to step on anyone's toes.

It's well past time we figure something out, though, and right now, the best solution (though still far from being perfect) we can come up with is to use the list of United Nations member states plus permanent UN observers as the most definitive source. We thought we'd kick that out to y'all and see if anybody would be negatively effected by doing it that way, though.

(Not that I think I need to say this since y'all are generally awesome, but: when weighing in on this discussion, please be respectful of other commenters; national and geopolitical identity is, as I said, an often-contentious and extremely personal topic.)

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Yesterday's Windows 7 updates included one that purported to update Windows' country list (what Windows functions use it, I am not sure, but apparently there is one) to include South Sudan. What source do you suppose they use?

Edited 2013-01-09 20:01 (UTC)

Almost certainly, an in-house database -- the problem is that there's no one single definitive source that you can update against programmatically and everybody's stuck rolling their own with whatever criteria they decide to use.

Do not catch on fire while in Australia O.o

Is there a way to resolve conflicts of name? F'rex, someone living in Burma/Myanmar or Taiwan/Chinese Taipei, where the name used may indicate a political preference or ideological identification that could prove...contentious.

If only one name can be used per country code, will it be the designation used in the UN list, assuming the country in question has reached at least observer status?

There isn't a way to have more than one name per country, no. Under this proposal we would use the UN designation.

But Taiwan is not a member nor an observer afaik? So it won't exist as choice?

spockette points out below, though, a country or national identity not being offered as a choice because it is considered to be part of a bigger entity or isn't part of the UN may not be a good option, either.

Not having Taiwan feels kind of wrong to me.

But in the end, it's really hard to decide when a country is "independent enough" (is Kosovo? is Transnistria? is Northern Cyprus? etc. etc.).

The UN might not be the most unbiased source, but then, who is?

I probably would have gone with ISO 3166 (as do tons of websites everywhere), but that ends up giving you a bunch of options for non-independent places (such as Åland Islands, Christmas Island, Réunion, etc.) while still not including others (such as Scotland).

So I guess the UN list is not perfect but at least it's a reliable and somewhat authoritative source. And *whatever* you pick is going to alienate someone.

I'm wondering more about the practical problem of what happens to places that are in the list now, but won't be then. And I don't even mean the contentious aspects. It's one thing to replace "Scotland" with "United Kingdom" because for now officially Scotland is still a member of the United Kingdom and the UK is the entity that is a UN member, regardless of how some of the Scottish people identify, but what about "South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands" which you can pick now and some people did? It belongs to the British Crown but is not part of the UK, yet not part of another UN member country either. It's not a contested situation like, say Kosovo. The UK does not say it is part of the UK. Do you just put it there for the purposes of the country list? Blank the field instead?

It's not so problematic with places that right now already don't exist, like Isle of Man is not on the list now, so probably if people care to be precise enough to pin down that they are in a Crown Dependency, they already use the other fields, and it won't exist in the new list. But in other cases the current list allows that pick. Like I suppose Puerto Rico may affect a number of people too.

Edited (missing end of sentence) 2013-01-09 23:09 (UTC)

This is tricky, because what you consider the country you live in is often all tied up in national identity.

The problem I can see is that this would remove Scotland from the list, meaning people in Scotland would have to choose "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland."

Whilst Scotland is one of the constituent countries of the UK, a lot of people here consider themselves to be Scottish, not British (polling data for the past 10 years is here, showing that, for the years with data, somewhere between 72 - 80% identify as Scottish, not British).

Especially now, with the SNP (pro-independence party) holding a majority government, and an independence referendum scheduled for next year, the issues of Scottish vs. UK identity is an incredibly contentious issue, and I am concerned that removing the location 'Scotland' and replacing it with 'United Kingdom' is kind of like pouring gasoline on an already raging fire.

I agree.

Yeah, that's the sort of thing we're concerned about. But on the other hand, it's making decisions like that on a case-by-case basis that's given us the mishmash of countries, former countries, territories, regions, regional subdivisions with a substantial nationalist/separatist movement, etc, that we have now -- for a while, inclusion on the country drop-down was basically "did you catch Brad in a good mood and convince him your national/geopolitical identity should be included in the list", which leads to really inconsistent results :/

So it's really tough. On the one hand, I can totally sympathize and agree with the desire for people in the UK-but-not-Britain to want to list the country they feel they belong in rather than the UK. (As well as many other issues.) On the other hand, doing anything other than "UN member countries and permanent observers" opens us up to having to make a judgement call in each particular situation, rather than simply deferring it to the UN, and we aren't experts there and would no doubt misstep.

It's a really hard problem. I don't think there's any one perfect solution. (At least, if we do go with this route, people whose self-identity is strongly tied up in a country that doesn't have official UN recognition would still be able to list their city and region, and specify detail in their bio: 'country' isn't a required field.)

But even putting the contested places aside, what do you do with territories that just aren't countries, but aren't properly part of another country either? Like those British Colonies that haven't become independent, but aren't part of the "United Kingdom" either? Like the British Overseas Territories or closer to the UK the Crown Dependencies? They aren't part of the UK like Scotland is (for now at least), but self-governing possessions of the British Crown.

Or Puerto Rico for that matter with the US. Right now it's on the list as "country".

To make things even more fun, Puerto Rico is also in the US list of "states", so it (and a few other US insular areas) has a double listing.

for a while, inclusion on the country drop-down was basically "did you catch Brad in a good mood and convince him your national/geopolitical identity should be included in the list", which leads to really inconsistent results :/

What is the problem with starting with any of these lists (UN, ISO, whatever) and then adding everything you get a user request for?

Not D, but I would say, in addition to making decisions about whether the request is a 'valid' one or not, maintaining that list, which is one of the current problems.

Why would it be appropriate for a web hosting provider cum social networking service to make decisions about the "validity" of someone's national self-identification?

Because you get things like Hogwarts, which I haven't a problem with, but then you're back to the idea of a text field and not a drop down menu because it has little purpose then.

I think that's kind of the point - they don't want to be put in the place of having to make those kinds of decisions.

That seems to run the risk of a mile long list diluted by the inclusion of every place someone has a strong feeling about declaring as their home country, even in absence of meaningful political movements or line of belief that it actually is a country, will be, or should be. This is also an area where someone could ostensibly be persecuted (or prosecuted) for their "political activities" on the internet. Messy business.

The United Nations is not a complete list of everywhere.

I don't know how to comment in a way which doesn't advocate lots of work for the lovely DW admins :/

Would "country codes" - like, not a precise name for each nation-state since that might exclude those not officially recognised by the UN - "country codes" meaning brief indications of approximately where on the planet each user comes from - be too contentious? This is probably a bad idea, but I am loath to baleet it.

When musing, I just thought of maybe denoting longitude and latitude! I am currently reading Jules Verne's book about the explorations of Africa between x and y latitudes...

Would "country codes" - like, not a precise name for each nation-state since that might exclude those not officially recognised by the UN - "country codes" meaning brief indications of approximately where on the planet each user comes from - be too contentious?

Where would that list of country codes come from?

Or to put it differently: who would get to decide what's in the list and what's not? Brad? Denise? The UN? ISO? The DW community as a whole?

I would vote for the DW community as a whole deciding the extent of a list, because they are the ones for whom we're trying to accommodate by this whole idea.

Then again, that closes the current DW community off - what if someone new came? How could they be accounted for? What if aliens from the moon showed up and wanted to post on DreamWidth accounts?

One solution would be to use the IANA toplevel domains instead/in addition. This would have the advantage of consistency with the email address checker. Someone mentioned Taiwan in a comment above. Users need the ability to enter name@example.tw addresses when they register, and it doesn't really make sense to me to have Taiwan in one list and not the other.

There's a lot to be said for that option.

It does bring up the issue of internationalized country codes, hope DW is handling those properly.

I think the question of internationalized domain names came up early, when DW was just a few mailing lists, and we said something like "revisit later". I don't remember the details.

I like this idea because it seems a little less personal than "naming my home country", and thus while it might still raise identity issues it couldn't (or couldn't as readily) be construed as "Dreamwidth is saying my county doesn't exist".

I really like this idea.

Why not just have a text field? That way people can enter whatever seems most appropriate to them. It's an optional field anyway, and it's not like DW is using the information to target ads or something, so I see no reason why people's selections should be pre-determined. Yes, some people will write in frivolous things, but so what? (You could also give people the choice of selecting a country from the UN list or writing in their own text.)

I like this option!

My thoughts exactly. I especially like your last idea. List + text field.

That option already exists (putting your location in your bio, which is a text field) -- the reason to use a standardized list of countries in the Location field is because the Location field ties into the directory search, allowing you to (for instance) look up users who specify the US as their location.

Would it be too much of a hassle to be able to select a country code, then overlay freetext on top of it, in the same way that we can make mood icons have more than just the default text associated with the icon? It doesn't solve the problem of "people without a country code", unless we potentially program in an "other" or "unspecified", but it might bring the best of both worlds together - a numeric, standardized field to search with, but text so that someone can be as specific as they want to describe?

ISO 3166-1 would provide a superset of the proposed list (249 countries vs. 195): it includes member states, members of UN agencies, and country and region codes defined by the UN statistics division. It therefore includes not only member and observer states, but also countries like Taiwan. And there is a mechanism for user-assigned codes which could be used for places like Scotland or Catalonia, where some users may identify with a nationality that isn't officially involved in international politics.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that you make it a text field.

What is it used for? Just for finding people near you? If so, how widely used is that feature?

If you don't much care about "people near you", then you can let users put whatever they like. Some will put "Hogwarts", of course, but so what? One option, though, could be that if someone puts something which isn't yet in the database, then suggest other options within a short edit distance of what they typed. Eg, I type "Austraila" (not typo) and it says, "Did you really mean Austraila, or were you thinking of a) Australia, b) Austria?" This will at least cluster popular locations and let you find other people in that location, tag-style.

If you care about "people near you", you could do geolocation. Let them type what they want, and you then use a Geo API (eg. Google Maps) to locate it on a map and say, "Is this where you meant?" If so, save their lat/long along with the text string they entered. This means that people with privacy concerns can say "Australia" and show an approximate location, while those who don't mind giving more information can say "Thornbury, Victoria, Australia" and give more.

"People near you" could be done using geo-coords, eg. "people within 100km" or whatever. There are libraries for this, if you have their lat/long.

(We're probably going to use the second of these options, i.e. text field entry, geolocation, and storing the lat/long, for Growstuff.)

Except that some people, while very willing to share their country, are in no way willing to share their actual lat/long. It's *too* precise to feel secure.

If you typed in "Australia", you'd see a map like this with a pin in the middle of it. If that was the level of privacy you were comfortable with, and confirmed that that pin placement represented your location closely enough for your comfort, then the lat/long saved to the database would accordingly be somewhat inaccurate relative to your *actual* location.

Edited 2013-01-10 04:18 (UTC)

Whups. Yes, that'd be fine. I apologize. I've gotten so used to having to tell apps on my smartphone not to spatter my location all over the internets, I just assumed precise geolocation was meant. (Dear auto-incorrect: NOT "grok ovation". Sheesh.)

I'm amused that your autocorrect groks "grok",

One problem with the "text field with clustering suggestions" method is that it may not be obvious what to cluster toward. Taking Austria as an example since you mentioned it, it's unclear to me whether the cluster point should be Austria (de facto understood as a name for the country worldwide, but an exonym nonetheless), Österreich (the official name in Standard German), Oesterreich (same, but changed not to use diacritics), Esterreich or Estreich (in Boarisch, the most common German-family language used in Austria) or Аустрија (in Serbian, which is one of the official regional/minority languages of Austria)?

Maybe some sort of Bayesian learning system that figures out what people mean based on actual user input? You could seed it with an initial country list and it would go from there, so even if you start out with something suboptimal it would correct over time.

Hmm. Not having a cellphone, I'm not familiar with Bayesian completion systems, but my fear is that https://twitter.com/azurelunatic/statuses/310185720855793666 might be applicable here as well.

I'm not familiar with either the UN list or the ISO list but I do have a question - what would happen when a country dissolves, or when this new list is adopted, and the list of country names no longer includes a country that a DW user has listed as their country?

Maybe it's a lot of work but I don't know why the idea that the existing list can't be added to by any DW user who submits a support request indicating what country they identify as coming from is somehow less authoritative than somebody at the UN deciding what's a country. The factors for saying no would be "This is not spelled correctly" and "this country was created by an author". If anyone has a problem with a specific country name being on the list the answer can simply be "there is at least one DW user who identifies as from this country and we respect their right to say so".

(FTR I'm Canadian but 95% of my relatives would throw a bloody fit if you told them they had to identify as coming from the UK instead of from Scotland. I also used to work at the UoT Slavic Languages and Literatures department where "what country are you from" was not exactly a minor issue. Let me tell you the ranting that would go on regarding what they force Macedonia to identify as in the parade of nations at the Olympics was not pretty and that was the most minor of the issues.)

Edited 2013-01-10 01:24 (UTC)

I strongly feel that users need to be able to name the country they identify as from the way they want to. So a solution should put that as the priority, not who the arbitrators are. Since it is easier to ask Dreamwidth to change a list if something is missing, rather than the U.N., why not populate your initial list from a source like the U.N., but say you will edit it for whatever people need added. Scotland and Taiwan should certainly be on any extant list.

I suspect I'm not adding anything to this conversation, but certainly I would have quite disenfranchised feelings on the subject if I was required to change my country from Scotland to the U.K. (we're often belittled by our country-mates south of the border and this would just be one more instance of being told that our feeling are silly and don't matter, frankly).

I'm aware that a standardised list is both required for ease of searching and is problematical because there isn't a non-contentious list that exists, but I see that a combination of both a list and an "other" field with a text option has been suggested - are there reasons why that wouldn't work? (Better, I think to allow people to pretend to be from Hogwarts than to exclude people from identifying from being from contentiously recognised actual places).

I think both a list and a text field is a good compromise. The label already says 'location', not country, so having a text field next to the menu would make it clear that you're aware that the predefined list doesn't cover everything, and would make sense there. It would also let people whose country is in the list but who doesn't live in a 'state' or a 'city' add what's correct for them.

Add a "why isn't my location in the 'location' drop-down menu" FAQ and I think you'd have done the best you could.

Edited 2013-01-10 13:26 (UTC)

I was chatting with a guy about Ukrainian history today. Now, there's an area that's had some shuffling over the last 600 years. Certain names are *very* political.

Perhaps have a "geo" locator, e.g., a drop-down specifying physical location (say, North America), and a text field for country, then another one for province[1].

That way you can both specify your location (for people who care) and your enfranchisement of choice.

a drop-down specifying physical location (say, North America)

This runs into much the same problems: there's no one single, standard, universal list of physical locations.

Is Israel in Asia? Middle East? EMEA? Some other geographical grouping?

Is Turkey in Europe? Asia? Both? Neither?

Is Mexico in North America? (According to Wikipedia, it's in North America but not in Northern America. And it's in Middle America but not in Central America.)

And I'm probably dating myself (again), but when I saw this comment again while getting rid of old notifications, my first thought was "Near East, not Middle East".

Or it could be a language thing -- German traditionally calls that area the "Near East", though one occasionally hears "Middle East" these days under the influence of English.

I would rather the location field be like tag autocomplete--here are some options, but put your own in and that's fine. Add a note saying that this field is used for searches so it's helpful to make sure your spelling is correct and you're done. Anything else is unnecessarily complicated for DW and potentially hurtful for users.

Edited 2013-01-11 19:44 (UTC)

what do the country codes get used for? Could broader "region" codes do the practical stuff, and allow you to make country a user-defined free text?

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[RFC] Country list for specifying location

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