230 countries is slightly high

This has all kinds of potential for turning into a giant political debate about what constitutes a country, which I'd rather not have to go through. But to summarize, I've been quick to resolve infra/webmaster issues requesting we add options to the "Country" list from places that aren't officially recognized as countries by the outside world, but where the people who live there consider themselves an independent place. Just because the U.S. still operates Puerto Rico as a colony doesn't mean everyone from there should be forced to identify themselves as from "United States". Similarly, just because Israel has illegally occupied Palestine for over 40 years doesn't mean Palestinians should be forced to say they're from "Israel"...

So, "should not count as countries on their own" is a matter of opinion. I have mine. Others will undoubtedly disagree. ;) We tend to avoid debates like this on d.o.

The compromise of calling these "Territories" seems a bit weird:

700,218 people in 230 territories speaking 182 languages power Drupal.

"Territory" could also be a state within a country. This is rather unspecific, and I bet people will be more confused.

If we must, we could have a tiny asterix next to country that links to a page where we say something like:

The Drupal community is made up of people from all over the world, including some places that are not officially recognized as countries. However, we support everyone's right to identify themselves in their own way, and provide some additional choices in our "country" selector to accommodate members of our community that live in disputed territories.

(or something)

Anyway, the patch is obviously a good start, so I committed that. The fix will go live when we next merge drupalorg into production, which has been happening at least a few times a day ever since the launch.

I'll leave this issue as needs review for now, although hopefully it won't turn into a giant mess. ;)

Cheers,
-Derek

If we change the label here we should change the profile field label and also the machine name. Changing the machine name requires a change to some profile code in drupalorg.module. I don't have a particular stance on this other than being inclusive seems good to me.

I think DWW brings up a very good point. What defines a country is not universally accepted and the dropdown select box on Drupal.org has been named Country for quite some time. We as administrators of Drupal created the dropdown list of all possible countries (which includes non UN countries) and making this change is modifying an existing field. We can't on one hand say "Please select your country" and then turn around and say "Whoops that's not a country". By allowing people from all over the world to define where they are from has de facto listed all of the various "countries" on the planet. This isn't a legal website nor a political one rather it is a website that reflects the Drupal community and it is the Drupal community that has stated their country of origin. We don't need to get into a debate telling people from non UN-defined countries that they are not actually in a country.

I'm of the opinion that the disclaimer added by DWW is acceptable.

http://drupal.org/node/955312

Attached patch for front page. Visible on http://redesign.drupal.org (although the link is broken there since the handbook page only lives on d.o for now).

Whoops, slight markup bug. Fixed.

Here's what the front page looks like:

And here's the current version of the page the asterix links to:

I also configured the "Country" profile field description on redesign.d.o to add a linked asterix there, too.

Any objections, or should I deploy all this live?

I think we should just ignore the potential dispute altogether and apply Damien's original patch.

+1 for the fix here added by dww. Looks great, and I love that we promote our community's general property of inclusiveness right on the home page now. :)

Committed the change to the home page template in drupalorg HEAD. Added the asterix to the country profile field description. The front page change will be visible when we next push changes live, probably later today. I'll come back and remove this tag once it's live.

@Gerhard: I wish you would read issues before commenting on them. Also, we don't want to completely ignore this dispute when people are reporting "bugs" about this, e.g. http://media.drupleh.com/own-little-world.png

dww: I totally read this issue and would prefer if you'd stop to interpret my actions.

I also saw this little screenshot which was in fact the reason which brought me to this issue. Generally I think that the UN and its list of sovereign states is very irrelevant to a software project such as Drupal and the software project should just ignore this issue in order to avoid more useless discussion on a matter which is 100% irrelevant to it (like the number of sovereign countries).

I get the "we don't want to get involved in politics" argument, but IMO it's trumped by the "everyone who comes to the front page is going to be confused about why there are more countries listed there than exist in the world by standard definitions" argument. Support requests--;

@Gerhard: All you wrote was "I think we should just ignore the potential dispute altogether and apply Damien's original patch" which implied you didn't read the end of comment #2 (where I said I had already committed the patch). Sorry I assumed you hadn't read the issue. I guess you just didn't read it closely. ;)

Deployed

per dww request here and here I am reopening this debate to propose to change the term "country" by "nation".

Amongst the big numbers In DO's frontpage there's one which says: "There are XXX people in 228 countries*"

Since there are around 204 countries in the world (according to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country or Wolfram http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=number+of+countries&lk=4) this number is quite confusing. In fact it is so confusing that there's a book page aimed to clarify why DO has more countries than Earth itself (see What do you mean by "country" on Drupal.org?).

My proposal is that instead of redefining already known and used concepts in order to fit them within drupal's interests, we could use an existing term that means exaclty what we want to mean and which use is broadly known and accepted, such as "nationallity".

These are my arguments for this decision:

Fact 1: Drupal states on frontpage that there are users from 228 countries whereas there are only 204 countries in the world (according to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country or Wolfram http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=number+of+countries&lk=4)
Fact 2: The word "Country" is not correct in this context, so it has to be changed or rephrased
Fact 3: Both country and nation have clear definitions and differences.
Fact 4: Nation has a meaning which fits best the definition made by drupal.org

Ergo:

Drupal.org should use nation instead of country.

Regards

Can you give me a good definition of "nation"?

Sure!

I will copy the first sentences of wikipedia's definition, which I think are quite clear for this purposes:

A nation may refer to a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, or history.[1] In this definition, a nation has no physical borders. However, it can also refer to people who share a common territory and government (for example the inhabitants of a sovereign state) irrespective of their ethnic make-up.[2][3] In international relations, nation can refer to a country or sovereign state.[1] The word nation can more specifically refer to people of North American Indians, such as the Cherokee Nation that prefer this term over the contested term tribe

Oxford dictionary also provides a similar definition:

a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular state or territory:

The only simple solution is to explain that Drupal.ORG recognizes more countries than the UN or the US.

Yes, Countries.

Easy.

Easier indeed but nor precise nor correct.

I just noticed this as well and after visiting the Wikipedia page linked I feel that we can be inclusive and factual at the same time.

If we're going to link to the Wikipedia article on "sovereign states" then maybe we should change the wording from countries to states? They have a very well thought out criteria that is both accurate and inclusive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states#Criteria_for_inclu...

By going this route we would end up with 206 states which would include most of the controversial ones. We could also adopt the criteria from Wikipedia which would make maintaining the list quite easy.

If you really want to keep all of the existing entries then you could change it to nations which would be the most inclusive and allow for various First Nations to be represented in addition to colonies such as commonwealths such as Puerto Rico or territories like Bermuda.

"States" is overloaded, and generally people think of the "states" within a country. We can't use that term since it's only going to make the problem worse.

"Nation" is okay, I guess, but it'd be a pain in the ass to make all the changes required for that.

Honestly, I don't see what's the big deal with the asterisk. There are an extremely small number of people complaining about that solution, and we have no idea how many people saw the number, thought "gee that's high, what's the asterisk about?", followed the link, and liked what they read. We have so many vastly more important problems on this site that I think it's best to just leave this closed.

I may be wrong, but I don't see much hard work in changing "countries" by "nations" and remove the * in home page. I don't know who can do that, but I am almost sure that it would have taken less time than what we are spending here discussing this. Not to mention that the information would have been correct and would not raise controversy nor would make other people feel uncomfortable due to political issues, not like now.

But as I said, if there's more work to do than changing just that, I agree there may be other important things to do and as such, we could postpone this (not close this, since this isn't "fixed").