[RFC] Country list for specifying location

[denise]

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to us sometimes is that our country list -- used, for example, for setting your Location on the Edit Profile page -- is out of date.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.)

Comments

[silveradept]

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?

[denise]

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

[ratcreature]

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

[silveradept]

As 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.

[pne]

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.

[ratcreature]

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.