[Pkg-isocodes-devel] Common names for countries in ISO 3166_1

[Yan Wong]

On 29 Jan 2013, at 18:11, Christian PERRIER wrote:

> So, the use ofcommon_name has been restricted to cases where we
> were explicitely asked by some users from these countries to use the
> common name of their country.

Yes - I fully appreciate that one has to tread carefully here. It wasn't clear to me how the "common names" had been chosen - and thanks for the clarification. However, I suspect a number of the ones I have listed are *not* controversial. For example, I've read (granted, that's not necessarily trustworthy) that Viet Nam "officially" uses "Vietnam" (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/06/04/10018681.aspx), and it's mainly the UN who break the word into two.

>> name="Korea, Democratic People's Republic of": common_name: "North Korea"
>> name="Korea, Republic of": common_name: "South Korea"
> 
> Sounds very controversial, indeed....

Well indeed. And I'm sure that not all of my suggestions will be acceptable. But some might. As a British citizen I'd be happy to request that a "common name" for the United Kingdom should be "UK". Of course, I'm not doing this on any special authority: purely the ability to be able to map common country names to their official ISO abbreviations.

Cheers,

Yan