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opendata-stuttgart / sensor.community

:sparkles: new shiny website built with svelte :heart: for dust and noise measuring project :point_right: https://sensor.community
https://sensor.community
MIT License
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Problematic usage of flags for languages #187

Open toastal opened 3 years ago

toastal commented 3 years ago

Flags represent nations, not languages. Please use the ‘turnstyle’ language icon if an icon is necessary and use the language name and/or language code to signify the language. (or similar as there may be some licensing issues with it)

Some obviously controversial flags: United Kingdom, Spain, France, Portugal. These examples have more speakers outside the origin country than within and is a very Euro-centric, colonial viewpoint of language to use any flag whatsoever.

Not to mention, many countries have more than one language which further propagates stereotypes or belittlement of minority groups inside those countries.

pjgueno commented 2 years ago

Not to mention, many countries have more than one language which further propagates stereotypes or belittlement of minority groups inside those countries.

I understand what you mean and I have already thought of it with English. But on the other hand you can also say that there are some conventions which can't be easily deconstructed. Why are the languages called "French", "English"... and not "the romantic language derived from latin after -51 with some celtic words and a full bench of arabic words and which was established in the territory at the West of the Alps in 1539"?

toastal commented 2 years ago

What? How about eliminating the flags so this becomes a non-issue instead of going down an tangential, but ultimately unrelated etymological path? Flags are for nations. Languages aren't nations. Flags for nations is the wrong symbol.

Here is a similarly-worded issue raised in another FOSS project: https://github.com/jdm-contrib/jdm/issues/972#event-5551620383. Amidst revamping their flag icons, they immediately halted seeing it was indeed problematic, brought up possible issues with the suggest turn-style icon, and implemented a flag-less version.

pjgueno commented 2 years ago

I repeat: I understand what you mean but there are convention for pictograms which are understood by the majority of the people and which make life easier for them. IMHO it is the case for flags as languages, like "skull and bones" for danger, the symbols for male and female on the toilets (I know what you will say)... There is a reason if flag are commonly used to describe even if it is not a good solution (it happens a lot in life, doesn't it?). I see that you make some issues for all the sites in Github. We are a community open source project with people working on it on their leisure time. Feel free to make a pull request it is what Github is made for and so you will participate. And I repeat a last time : I see why it is problematic. As a lot of people I had some courses for Geography at school and I read a lot about Geopolitics for the past 20 years.

ghost commented 2 years ago

pictograms which are understood by the majority of the people and which make life easier for them

It's not 'easier' for a speaker of Brazilian Portuguese to select a localisation for the language they prefer by clicking on a menu-item labelled '🇵🇹 pt' rather than just 'PT' or 'Português'. And it's not 'easier' for someone living in Taiwan or Singapore to select a menu item implying that another country controls their language -- especially since it would be more immediately useful anyway to specify which writing system is employed in the localisation (ZH-HANT, ZH-HANS, etc.). You don't have a Vietnamese localisation, so you wouldn't have to consider those speakers who fled the government whose flag would in the current scheme represent that language.

I understand the ethic of 'put up or shut up' with the call to providing a pull request, but literally all the needed information for the menu is already next to the emojis -- they just add a layer of misinformation. If you think the ISO 639-1 codes are confusing, a tooltip could give the full name of the localisation in that localisation. I mean, ultimately it's a small part of the project so nothing catastrophic would happen if issue #187 gets ignored, but it's a common anti-pattern with an easy fix. From my perspective, that's the simple conclusion.

toastal commented 2 years ago

I'm looking at getting some sensor gear for my next apartment, so I'm assessing software that fits the bill; I don't tend to make merge requests for software I'm not yet using. Seeing this UX errors using flags was a turn off for the reasons I had stated; seeing the needless hostility didn't bode well either (if you agree, why try to get in a semantic argument? why try to defend yourself with a class you took in school? was there a purpose? just leave it as the triaged 'bug'). At least one person has voiced a similar belief and there probably are more -- especially those that don't understand or want to sign up for GitHub (which is a privacy concern) to raise the issue. I do do a lot of open source merge requests, but the comment wasn't a very inviting statement on behalf of the community. A change to UX to represent more people however is an inviting gesture.