I recently found that Deluge is using country flags to indicate the location of bittorrent peers. Flags are cute and nice of course (and a mental exercise), but are geopolitical hot spots.
Upstream didn't like the concern, calling some people (including me?) "crazy ideologists". But the Fedora maintainer (Peter Gordon) fixed the bug in Rawhide (but we're still shipping flags in F9 and F10):
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=479265
But this is not why I'm writing. I'm writing because during the report, I found that we really don't have any official policy on flags. All I found in the wiki was what I had written myself a while ago, here, which is just based on my own experience as an i18n guy:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Languages#I_wish_to_use_my_country.27s_flag_to...
But we really need a policy. And I thought this list is the best forum to get it into shape. The history is like this: With RHL 8.0, Red Hat decided to remove the Taiwan/Republic of China flag from KDE because of sensitivities/legal requirements of mainland/People's Rebublic of China. That created some public unease, including people stopping to use RHL because of that. Red Hat went a bit further of course, and removed all national flags in a later version.
This is not restricted to Red Hat of course. Microsoft is usually in the spotlight for such geopolitical concerns:
On geopolitical issues resulting in a worse user experience for timezone selection: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2003/08/22/54679.aspx
On swastika symbols in Japanese fonts causing user outrage (the characters were in Unicode at U+534D and U+5350): http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/dec03/12-12FontLetter.mspx
These questions remain. Sorry for being a bit forward looking, but I would hate to revisit the issue later:
* What is the exact policy for Fedora? Why? Is it because of Red Hat's liability or is there other reasons too?
* How serious is shipping flags? Should they be removed as soon as they are discovered? For example, should Deluge remove them from F9 and F10 as well?
* Should country flags be avoided at all costs, or is it just the association of countries/territories/languages with flags that should be avoided? For example, is it OK to use an icon showing three flags (of say, US, Italy, and France) to indicate a locale/language selection application?
* What about organization/regional/political/historical/religious/linguistic flags? Examples: UN's flag (presently used as the default icon for System > Administration > Language in F10), Mississippi's flag, the LGBT flag, Hezollah's flag, the Confederate flag, the Jain flag, the Nazi flag, the Tibet flag, and the Esperanto flag. All of these could be controversial.
* What about political symbols (including the stuff you see in coats of arms or in the middle of flags)? For example, is it OK to use the lebanese cedar to refer to an input method for Lebanese Arabic or use the Tajikistani crown to refer to the Tajik language?
* What about flags used for edutainment purposes? For example, is it OK to ship an educational game that teaches kids about country flags or historical flags? Is it OK to use a flag for country/language selection in a game UI to be used by kids who can't read yet (but may be able to recognize flags for their country/language)?
* Presently, the Unicode consortium is considering a proposal to encode various symbols (called emoji) used in Japanese cellphones in the Unicode Standard. This very large set includes flags of a few countries, like the flag of the People's Republic of China:
http://www.unicode.org/~scherer/emoji4unicode/snapshot/utc.html#e-4E5 [warning: hundreds of small icons on the page]
From what I can tell, the proposal has a very high chance of
acceptance, and those flags will become Unicode characters. When fonts we ship start to include glyphs for such flags, what do we do? Do we remove them from the fonts when shipping them?
Thanks for reading until here, Roozbeh
On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 12:08:04PM -0800, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
I recently found that Deluge is using country flags to indicate the location of bittorrent peers. Flags are cute and nice of course (and a mental exercise), but are geopolitical hot spots.
I don't really have anything to add other than that this seems like a good topic, you've given the scope some good thought. If this is not really on-topic for legal, you could bring it to fedora-advisory-board.
What I've always "heard" about why we don't use flags for languages in fact matches what is on wiki/Languages. I always considered it simple respect for the varying opinions in the world, combined with the fact that a language is not the same as a country, so using flags is inaccurate.
For a torrent tracker that is in fact tied to a country of origin for the torrent source, the flag makes sense. The upstream has to be willing to keep that updated, though; when a country changes flags, for example. However, is there a source for free-as-in-freedom images for all flags? Is Deluge making their own?
- Karsten
On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 12:08 PM, Roozbeh Pournader roozbeh@gmail.com wrote:
- Presently, the Unicode consortium is considering a proposal to
encode various symbols (called emoji) used in Japanese cellphones in the Unicode Standard. This very large set includes flags of a few countries, like the flag of the People's Republic of China:
http://www.unicode.org/~scherer/emoji4unicode/snapshot/utc.html#e-4E5 [warning: hundreds of small icons on the page]
From what I can tell, the proposal has a very high chance of acceptance, and those flags will become Unicode characters. When fonts we ship start to include glyphs for such flags, what do we do? Do we remove them from the fonts when shipping them?
I am just back from the Unicode Technical Committee meeting. During the emoji discussions, as a GNOME's representatives to Unicode, I mentioned some of the controversial issues that will raise if Unicode encodes flags.
The committee agreed to not encode those characters as flags, but only as place-holder characters for compatibility with Japanese telephone company standards.
The characters are now only called Emoji Symbol GB, Emoji Symbol CN, Emoji Symbol RU, etc, and their glyphs are just the two letters in a dashed box, like this:
http://unicode.org/~scherer/emoji4unicode/fontimg/AEmoji_E4ED.png
So, no worries on this part of the flags issue anymore.
Roozbeh
-
Karsten Wade -
Roozbeh Pournader