Delete country lists from drupal.org handbook

+1 from me.

nevermind, I like the way it is... can we close it?

edited as test!

here I will add "these maybe out of date"

Well, bryan kennedy and I clearly think it would be useful for it to be something other than "the way it is." Do you want to say why you think this should be closed?

Then what's the point? Why would anyone download them if they might be out of date?

Why not just link to other externally-maintained, canonical lists?

I also added D5 and D6 to the list of supported applications

Um, since bryan kennedy originally, and I right now, think that this should be altered, can you at least leave this as "needs review" instead of continually setting it to "fixed" based on nothing but your own whim?

If other people overwhelmingly agree with you and comment here than fine. But just ignoring what's been suggested and saying, "nah, it's fixed" is incredibly annoying.

Thanks.

duplicate post

I mark them as fixed as I feel necessary (because no one else goes through all 200+ of the issues and decides to clean them up) thus I make a decision based on my best assumptions of what needs to be done. As far as you find it annoying, you are more then welcome to complain about me, talk to others, or bring up issues. I recommend that you talk to add1sun on IRC, me and her have been talking through out this process of me reviewing these items.

You wanted outside links... provided
You wanted to remove the current data... Denied
"Do to the constantly changing nature of this data, it is often best to comprise your own data from up to date information provided in the above links. However for convenience we have the following files." -- ADDED
... So check your revisions...

Mike

Also if you want more, then you can edit any page without issuing a document ticket! As for "Needs Review"... you asked me to review your requested material, I did, came up with a good solution and reviewed it... Again DONE! Want to keep it as "Needs Review" or "Active" for another year? Who will look at your post when its number 200 again?

I contacted you separately because I don't want this to get personal on the issue queue.

The original poster presented an issue: Including lists of external countries on d.o would result in those lists being out of date. He proposed linking to other, externally-maintained lists instead. You can agree or disagree with him, but it was a reasonable concern.

Can you post about why you think this particular concern of the original poster's is unwarranted? At the very least, when other people come across the issue, they should know *why* it was marked fixed.

So, respectfully, I'm changing this back to "needs review" yet again (in the hopes it will "get some attention") and I hope you won't mark it as fixed without letting the debate play out a little first.

Thanks.

I didn't make the changes to the page yet because I thought it was a reasonable question that merited discussion. The options aren't only "do exactly what the original poster said" or "do nothing and mark it fixed."

Some issues are worth talking out before spending time shooting them down. And I watch my issue queue closely so, respectfully -- yes, I will look at it if it's still active in another year.

I'm still interested in hearing your opinion on why the original concern is unmerited.

I am referring this issue to a individual who is higher up in the food chain! Im done wasting my time on this... I got over 100 more tickets to review... Please do not contact me privately to insult me. You say you don't want to argue in public, so you send me flame mail...

Marked #394200: Remove the list of countries as dupe, although it's slightly older we might as well continue the discussion here.

(This means there are now three people who agree that these included country lists aren't maintainable. So far no one has offered a counterargument...)

Then change it... I dont care... I don't think this needs a discussion... Documentation is just done... You want to make a change, then you change it... Issues are for concerns based on structure, locked threads, etc...

I looked at the post, and saw that the OP wanted references to external sites... I checked to see if the sites currently listed were valid (non-commercial), and I felt that was what he was asking for. So I marked it as fixed.

You came back and said that wasn't enough, so I went in and put a statement that the files included are not up to date. You proceed to insult me (which you edited out).

I then added a comment to the document stating that the included files where not upto date... I marked it as fixed...

You then re-opened the ticket looking for a debate, and proceeded to send me a nasty email.

Minor change does not need to be queued. I am not in argument with you... You said you wanted a change, so I changed it... I added a statement that said the file could be out of date. If you don't think this is enough, then make your own revision.

And stop editing your comments... its driving me nuts...

After 2 months of waiting for a discussion on if it should or should not exist... there still is no discussion... then it is right to assume no one has an opinion. You point to another post were the topic was closed (but the file was not removed)... I am not taking sides in the discussion, I'm fixing the document. I just was not going to remove a file, I was not telling you not to.

This is how it works. If you want to change something, change it... you don't need permission to change everything! especially tickets that have been open for 3 months without a reply!

Edit: If you do change it please fix my spelling of "Do" to "Due"

The original poster pointed out that the attachment at the bottom of that page, which is here:

http://drupal.org/files/profile-country-list.txt

would probably go out of date, and should be deleted. Neither he or I have the privileges to delete the file from that page. Thus, it was completely reasonable for him to post here, suggesting it be deleted.

I continue to wait to hear why you think it should NOT be deleted.

In other words, I can't just change it and neither could he, because we don't have the privileges.

That's what issue queues are for.

It is completely normal to (attempt) to start a discussion or ask for opinions on documentation changes. I hope this issue can get back on a civilized track.

Ceterum autem censeo, editable followups are evil.

+1 to removing lists of countries and any other information that is maintained elsewhere on the Internet.

This is out of scope for Drupal documentation and should be replaced by links to the primary sources.

+1 to replacing as much of this page as possible with links to primary sources.

I've edited the page to explain the primary sources (the ISO 3166-1 standard, with Wikipedia as a backup).

What remains to be done is to delete the attachment (profile-country-list.txt) and the list of names in English. In addition, I believe most of the other language-specific nodes can be deleted as well, since they are based on translations which are also available on Wikipedia. (The exception may be node 409896, which I would not delete until a native speaker confirms that it's redundant.)

Regarding node/409896... Unfortunately, there are no list of countries in the Filipino language in Wikipedia. I doubt if there are other sources for this yet because the "Guide to Orthography of the Filipino Language" was just released officially in 2008. The list was based from the english list on wikipedia and translated based from the said guide to orthography.

It seems that the other lists are copied from Wikipedia. There is a difference and an advantage I see in the Drupal Docs versions though. It's meant for your Drupal installation. You can just copy the list and paste directly to the country profile settings....no hassles. The wikipedia versions are in tables and have other columns and info you don't need. Imagine that you will be needing this list on your country profile field, and you go here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states Isn't it a PITA? So personally, I will rather see a simple list I can grab. Same thing as other howtos in the Docs, I appreciate the simple php snippets (which also get outdated) given to me which I can copy and paste directly to my Drupal installation rather than links to api.drupal.org and php.net to decipher things myself.

Edit:But if the consensus is to delete all the lists, then I'm fine with it. can I suggest to archive the pages instead.

Looks like I was right about note 409896. We should not delete that. Not yet, at any rate.

I'm sympathetic to the argument that we should keep these lists around for the moment because extracting plain lists of country names from Wikipedia is a big pain, requiring lots of retyping, clever cut-and-pasting, or even cleverer regexp wizardry. The problem is that the current "solution" -- lots of lists stuck into the handbook, updated haphazardly, and manually cut-and-pasted into people's sites -- is not very good either.

My theory is that the correct answer is some sort of module or set of modules that embody the country lists (along with translations of same). Then that module can be version-controlled and centrally maintained and updated by its users. There's already a module (Country Codes API: http://drupal.org/project/countries_api ) that provides PHP API calls for translating country codes into official short names -- it's likely that a good plan is to build upon that.

But that is work in progress. In the meantime, I suppose we could consider keeping the lists around. It would be nice if we found a place to keep them that was not part of the documentation -- because, whatever purpose these lists serve, documentation isn't really it. Is there any better place?

+1 to the idea that Data mining is out of the scope of Drupal Documentation... I think this page should be archived or deleted!

Seems like the general consensus is to not haphazardly replicate data that is better maintained elsewhere, and I would agree. I think we should remove the attached file, but no one can do that right now, including me, because the Upload module is borked for book pages on d.o, so we can't add or remove attachments. :-/ I think we can go ahead and immediately move forward with archiving all of the children pages though.

I have been thinking about the scope of Drupal Documentation, and how this document fits within it.

If this document dealt only with the topic of finding Geo Data, then I would say that this is out of scope.

However,

I believe that if this document was focused on how to add taxonomy data to the user profile, that this document would be a good resource. The Title should reflect this by changing it to "Adding Taxonomy Data to a User Profile" and then slightly modifying the document to focus the document to reflect this goal. We can then use the current document as an example of how to do this.

I think this resolves everyone's issues and makes this document into a valuable resource for the Drupal community.

As for the topic of dealing with Data Mining, it could fit within this document only as it pertains to the topic. We should only use wikipedia as an example of where we got our data. We should not endorse Wikipedia or any other resource as providing quality data. I believe GOOGLE does a great job for those looking to find the data they need to fill in their own taxonomy structure. After all Wikipedia could be incorrect.

The topic of providing a resource for listing "Sovereign State's" is not as simple as it seems. Many countries have recognize "Sovereignty" differently. I don't mention this to start a political discussion about such topics, but to simply give an example of why Drupal should not recognize one resource over another. I would avoid suggesting Wikipedia as a reference, because the data is only as valid as the last person who entered it.

In fact, I think it is notable to tell the person to find the data that meets there goals. thus change the statement to "In this example we will be using the ISO ... as a source for data collection," (I almost want to say "Try Google!" but hell we dont need to protect people from their own stupidity).

I would also like to suggest adding a reference to the location module.

It was RTBC so I moved forward with archiving all of the children pages.

The remaining task is to delete the txt attachment, but since we can't add or remove attachments... changing the status to "postponed" until file attachments in book pages is fixed.

Never minded that creating that Handbook page for helping people would result into troubles. Hopefully you found a solution :)

Thanks for archiving it, because it taken 4 hours from me and 2 hours from a friend for the English and Spanish versions. Add 15 hours for the other child pages, comments and editions. The total work taken 20 hours more less.

I like the Country API module so I added a comment: http://drupal.org/node/118544#comment-1624244

Blessings!

file has been deleted.

(yay for doc-team permissions.)