Country thesaurus includes entries that aren't countries

[joeroe]

I noticed that fix_database_country_name() currently returns some country names that aren't actually (or currently) countries:

• Channel Islands (as opposed to Jersey or Guernsey)
• Corsica
• Crete
• Sardinia
• Yugoslavia

This might not be a bug exactly—these labels do contain useful geographic information—but I wouldn't say it's expected behaviour since the name of the function implies a sovereign country will be returned. So if they remain in the thesaurus, maybe that should be documented somewhere?

I also spotted some inconsistencies in names for the same country:

• Czechia/Czech Republic

And some mistakes in the corrected names:

• Lybia (Libya?)
• Tunesia (Tunisia?)

[nevrome]

Thank you very much for pointing out these issues!

fix_database_country_name() uses two methods to determine "correct" country names:

1. Comparison with a manually curated thesaurus table
2. Fuzzy matching to countrycode::codelist[["country.name.en"]]

The following issues were wrong entries in the thesaurus and just fixed in b31ef977a28def0dd55b49246fa17bae8cb79001:

Corsica Crete Czechia/Czech Republic Lybia (Libya?) Tunesia (Tunisia?)

The other mentioned entities (Channel Islands, Sardinia, Yugoslavia) do exist in countrycode::codelist[["country.name.en"]] and as this is our major point of reference I think it's better to keep them as they are.

Yugoslavia is a clear case, because this former country covers multiple modern countries and it would not be clear to which one the respective date should be attributed. I think for the purpose of this function we should keep sunken empires alive :smile:. I'm less sure about Sardinia and Channel Islands, though.

[joeroe]

Thanks! Definitely agree with leaving Yugoslavia. The Channel Islands are weird, and Sardinia has been part of Italy for a long time...

I spotted these when trying to join the full database to Natural Earth (which uses ISO/FIPS names) based on country names. Had I read the fix_database_country_name() documentation properly, I would have spotted that I could just have standardised them with countrycode::countryname(), so yes consistency is definitely the winner!

[nevrome]

Hm - we could omit some rows of countrycode::codelist for our lookup to get rid of Sardinia and other less useful entries. What do you think, @dirkseidensticker ?

[nevrome]

I had a shower thought regarding this issue: We could very well get rid of countrycode::codelist and instead extent our own country thesaurus. We would probably not loose much, but gain full control over the country list. Would also make our code more simple.

[nevrome]

We decided to indeed implement this suggested change. @yesdavid offered to implement a first draft :+1:

[nevrome]

This is not relevant any more, as we deprecated fix_database_country_name() in v.3.0 without a replacement.