Consider adding info about recent Afghanistan flag change

[lepras]

I see this as the commit that changed it.

Reading the wiki page here, I see Afghanistan has too many flag changes in the past.

But I think we should mention it as Flag of Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and not Afghanistan. Came to this conclusion after reading the comments of this geography now short. We follow the UN recognized thingy, no?

What do you think? (I am not too sure about this but I think its worth a discussion)

[aplaice]

We have the policy of following Wikipedia to avoid having to worry (too much) about doing the wrong thing and to outsource any controversy to them. Wikipedia uses the Taliban flag, so I think we should too. :/

---

On the object level:

It's obviously deeply unfortunate that the Taliban has taken over. It seems that the Taliban government isn't internationally recognised, neither by other governments nor by the UN.

However, it is also the case that it's in full, internally undisputed and stable control of the country. In general (in line with what Wikipedia seems to be doing), we have the policy of following the "status on the ground". For instance, we include various internationally unrecognised states, such as Taiwan, Somaliland or Transnistria.

---

I agree, though, that some sort of "flag information" would be valuable.

[lepras]

Thx for the quick reply!

"On the ground" aproach seems like the best strategy.

Is there any field we use for meta-info? Like we have a field for similarity of flags.

Or just renaming Afghanistan to IEA everywhere works?

[aplaice]

Like we have a field for similarity of flags.

We have "Country info" and "capital info", and "flag similarity", but no flag info. With some workarounds, we could reuse the "flag similarity" field, but it'd be suboptimal (we currently hardcode the string "flag similar to", if there's a flag similarity).

We could also add a new flag info field, which would be also valuable for #591.

I'll rename the issue accordingly.

Or just renaming Afghanistan to IEA everywhere works?

That wouldn't really help, since it wouldn't say anything about the flag change or the fact that there is/was an alternative flag. (It'd also go against our policy of using the short name of the country, unless disambiguation is needed.)

[axelboc]

Adding a new flag info field seems all the more justified now! We'll have to see if we can solve both #591 and this issue with a single extra field, but I don't see why not. For the alternative flag, we may have to put both the text and the image in the field instead of just the image, but that's okay, I think.

[ohare93]

A new flag info field? Let me add my own feature creep request: flag names! For instance, the Scottish flag is called "The Saltire". I'm sure lots of other flags have names, yet I would normally never know tbh