CampTix: Country Name Spelled Wrong

[Yuli Yang]

Hi,

I'm lead organizer of WordCamp Taipei 2019. I noticed that my country's name is not spelled correctly in Camptix country field and the local may feel offended. Currently, the country is listed as "China, Republic of (Taiwan)". Our official country name is the "Republic of China (Taiwan)".
When inputting country selector, Taiwanese usually type "T" to look for "Taiwan". If our country does not come up, we type "R" to look for "Republic of China (Taiwan)." Nowadays, Taiwanese prefer to use "Taiwan".

Thanks in advance for anyone who can help with this.

[Yuli Yang]

Taiwan's country name is spelled wrong in CampTix

[iandunn]

I agree that simply Taiwan would be easier for people to find. It's probably just the way it is because the list of countries was pulled from some ISO database or something. I'd rather have something that is easy for people and matches their expectations, though, rather than the "official" name.

It'd also be nice to implement selectWoo / select2 to make searching easier. We could probably do that in camptix-tweaks to avoid having to bundle it in CampTix itself, since it already exists on WordCamp.org.

We might want to use Taiwan (Republic of China) to also cover people who start by typing republic.

[Kenshino]

@iandunn It's very unlikely people will type Republic. FWIW, Singapore is actually Republic of Singapore :) But no one thinks of that.

There are sensitivity issues right now towards the sovereignty of Taiwan and I feel we should respect that and not end up accidentally upsetting a group of people.

I'd suggest just keeping to Taiwan.

Btw on a side note, it doesn't seem to list Hong Kong. So perhaps it's missing territories entirely.

[iandunn]

It's very unlikely people will type Republic. FWIW, Singapore is actually Republic of Singapore :) But no one thinks of that.

WFM.

it doesn't seem to list Hong Kong

Unfortunately we've got a bunch of country lists throughout the wordcamp.org codebase. e.g.:

question_field_country()
MES_Sponsor::markup_meta_boxes()
WordCamp_Post_Type_Plugin::metabox_sponsor_info()

I think we should update them all to use wcorg_get_countries() as the canonical list. That uses ISO-3166, and does include Hong Kong. Then we can update wcorg_get_countries() to change Taiwan, Province of China to just Taiwan.

CampTix couldn't use that function directly, since it's distributed in the w.org repo, but we've talked about removing it from the repo in the past, and this might be a good time to do that. If we do, then it could use the function. If we don't do that, we could copy/paste the canonical list into CampTix's existing function.

It'd be good to also use Select2 on all of those fields above; related #4303

[Kenshino]

Hey @iandunn the approach looks good.

It does feel like it'd take a bit of time and while we have ticket Sales open - any chance we can drop in a temp fix for now?

[Yuli Yang]

Hi @iandunn

It would be nice if we could have a temporary solution before we start selling tickets in September. I would rather not to upset people at this sensitive time. Thank you so much for helping!

[iandunn]

@andreamiddleton is planning to take a look soon and give feedback on the ideas we've discussed so far.

[iandunn]

It's worth noting that ​Drupal switched from ISO-3166 to CLDR, both for political and UX reasons.

WordPress.com also uses CLDR in some places, and released ​a plugin that could be helpful.

[adityakane]

Hi @iandunn
I like the idea of using CLDR - which is used by Wikimedia Foundation and Mozilla.
It is also used by Debian Linux, Open Office and CERN.

Source: ​http://cldr.unicode.org/#TOC-Who-uses-CLDR-

This is the country list resource

• ​https://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/latest/supplemental/territory_language_information.html

I find Mozilla communities list Taiwan as just "Taiwan"

• ​https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/contact/communities/taiwan/

[Nao]

​https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1#Naming_and_disputes says:

The country names used in ISO 3166-1 are taken from the two UN sources mentioned above. Some country names used by the UN, and accordingly by ISO, are subject to dispute:

Some of the country names in the CampTix list don't exactly match ISO 3166. For example, "Congo, (Brazzaville)" and "Congo, (Congo Kinshasa)" are in the CampTix list, but ​ISO 3166 has "Congo, Democratic Republic of the" and "Congo (the)". There are other discrepancies as well.

In any case, I agree with what many of the commenters on ​Drupal's page that Ian linked earlier. I agree that CLDR is a more suitable list for our purpose. For ISO 3166-1, the complete code list in XML/CSV/XLS formats are available ​for purchase (see ​related Wikipedia section) while small sample portions & ​online browsable version are free. Using CLDR's JSON format of county code & names can be a better source for up-to-date information.

[andreamiddleton]

I agree that shifting our standard to CLDR seems to be the best way forward.

[Yuli Yang]

Caught this in WordCamp sponsor custom post type. It's not CampTix but it's the same situation.
​https://cl.ly/cd2f23658c97

[coreymckrill]

The country names in both CampTix and in other places in the WordCamp codebase, such as sponsor info, have now been updated to use CLDR data provided by the ​wp-cldr plugin. For some of these places, the new data source will only be used with new WordCamp sites going forward. Existing sites will continue to use the old data sources, in order to prevent back compatibility issues and data loss. However, individual sites can be switched to the new data source if there is a need.

Relevant commits:

• ​https://github.com/WordPress/wordcamp.org/commit/68330462c4f1beb0c6eeddf3742010ff7b4e31d4
• ​https://github.com/WordPress/wordcamp.org/commit/f047170f6fa1c318eac35ee9182c31e5bea4ae16