Description

{en} - English - map to the Union Jack flag {en} which is incorrect and possibly offensive for people from U.S, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Australia and others.

The Union Jack as it is now seen dates from the union of Ireland with Great Britain to form the United Kingdom.

Discussion

Resolution: The markup {en} should be replaced by {uk} to display the Union Jack.

If the {en} for England, markup is to be retained, it should result in the display of the St George Cross , also if {en} is retained, markup for the other constituents of the United Kingdom should also be included, namely Northern Ireland - ??; Scotland - St Andrew's Cross and Wales - The Red Dragon.

{en} means English, not England. We can replace the flag with {us} to solve the uk politics

• But of course, the Americans don't speak real English, do they?

The basic problem here is trying to map language names to flags, which does not work for all cases, and generally a political problem.

How others use languages and flags

Mac OS X

the language to symbol mappings are:

Gnome

Does not show flags, only the language name, avoid the political problems but not nice and easy to recognize as color flags/symbols.

• Gnome HIG - internationalization

KDE

Windows

WikiPedia

Does not use flags to mention pages in other languages, only the language name, usually in a pair: native name (English name)

Links

• Flag as a symbol of language - stupidity or insult?

• Using Symbols and Icons in Localization

Discussion

The point is that there are two things: languages and countries.

I think the current moin flags were intended (and are mostly used) as language flags, but they represent countries, which is problematic.

The only solution would be to solve it for both:

• have one set of LANGUAGE icons
  • There is no such thing as LANGUAGE icons.
• have one set of COUNTRY icons (if we need that?)
  • This is what we have now - us, de etc. - but [en] is not correct, it uses the [uk] flag, therefore the simple fix is to add [uk]
• have methods to easily access them
  • Typing [en] is an easy access method

Until there is a concrete plan and a concrete collection of suitable icons, it is rather likely that this won't be changed at all.

• I suggest to fix the uk thing now, a tiny patch without any side effects, and think later how to deal with this issue.

I'll add a patch here for those who like to see uk.

We could either drop those flags completely, having moin render {en} (thus: no problem, it denotes the language according to iso639-1 2letter language abbreviations or we could have some icons showing those 2letter abbreviations (kind of pointless using gfx for that and not worth the trouble of light vs. dark themes, completeness etc).

So if noone has a better idea, we simply drop those icons and render {en} verbatim.

I like the icons - it seems a shame to just drop them - and would be happy with {uk} (speaking as a resident of England...) -- PaulMoore 2005-12-13 20:52:59

Plan

• Priority:

• Assigned to: ThomasWaldmann

• Status: removing all nationality flags, {xx} will now just render as plain text (and thus, indicate LANGUAGE, not some nation, as it was originally intended). Using nationality flags was just a wrong and bad idea.

CategoryMoinMoinBugFixed