Place names throughout time/transition/colonization

[drnikki]

In conversation with Zenlan in the Drupal Diversity & Inclusion channel, they shared this link with the comment: "I threw up this little demo on the back of a talk by GDS about government registers, how to get the correct country name given someone's date of birth... http://zenlan.com/registers/"

We don't currently ask an individual's country of birth, but it's worth noting (and perhaps calling out somewhere) that as place names and boundaries change, it would be ideal to allow for an inclusive way to identify that place.

This also includes indigenous peoples who's land has been colonized. They may prefer to refer to their places using un-colonized place/territory names.

[martinheidegger]

As someone living in a country very different from my birth country it seems like can be split in two relevant parts:

1. residence, which is important in order to build communities: i.e. if we organize a conference it'd be good if people didn't need to travel that much.
2. comprehension, which in a way is very similar to language: What countries do you know from a legal/cultural perspective? A fictional person is born in India but has lived there for 2 years before migrating to france, living with foster parents, making India a footnote. As that person lives on the border to germany that person might answer: France: 5/5 familiarity, Germany: 3/5 familiarity

[penyuan]

Hello everyone,

I am from a place that has been excluded from the ISO 3166-1 list mentioned on this page.

I agree with the statement there that "a list of countries is a political matter", and in my opinion there is no single "non-political" or "neutral" way to do this and that's OK as we acknowledge this reality.

For that page, I suggest a few improvements:

1. Suggest to the reader that unless they are specifically asking about countries and need that information, they could phrase their question as "Where are you from/based" instead of "Which country are you from/based".
2. Suggest that as an alternative to ISO 3166-1, there is also the Unicode CLDR list which is explicitly not limited to "countries", but also places at different levels of granularity (from continents, regions, to small territories depending on what you're looking for). The CLDR is also a widely-used international standard.
3. Suggest to the reader that they could at least include an "Other" option for the respondent to self-identify a place. This is not ideal, but at least partially addresses the colonization problem.

What do you think? I am happy to submit a pull request if that helps.