Taiwan, Province of China

Software Support
1

Hello,

I noticed that the drop down menu of countries (when choosing the location of a user) lists Taiwan as “Taiwan, Province of China”. This means that no Taiwanese academic is able to register as they are not allowed to, and would never, identify as such. It is also politically very problematic. Is it possible to change this so that it simply says Taiwan, in the same way as it simply says Hong Kong?

Seems a small matter but it really isn’t.

Gerda Wielander
Editor, British Journal of Chinese Studies

2

Hi @wielang,

Which of our applications are you using, and what version?

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

3

OJS 3.1.1.4
I realise there are already solutions proposed in previous chats, so apologies for raising this again. We shall consult previous suggestions.

4

Hi @wielang,

I ask because we also changed our approach to language/currency/country databases; in OJS/OMP 3.1.2 and prior, we maintained our own lists, periodically synchronized from the Debian iso-codes database. Starting with OJS/OPS/OMP 3.2, we’re using the php-isocodes library.

Fundamentally, both approaches rely on the ISO3166 standard, which acknowledges that the naming of Taiwan is disputed.

We’re hesitant to diverge from the ISO3166 standard – not specifically because of Taiwan’s situation, but because it’s a bit of a Pandora’s Box. Instead, we’ve been sticking to the standard, but pointing out where the changes would need to be made to change the list. Among bad options, this seems like the most manageable.

For OJS/OMP 3.1.2 and older, the lists are maintained in lib/pkp/locale/en_US/countries.xml (with en_US for the U.S. English locale, in this case).

For OJS/OPS/OMP 3.2 and newer, the lists are maintained in lib/pkp/lib/vendor/sokil/php-isocodes/databases/iso_3166-1.json for English and sokil/php-isocodes/messages/xx/LC_MESSAGES/3166-1.mo / .po (where xx is the language code) for other languages. The .mo and .po files are Gettext files. There’s information on updating/rebuilding the database here: GitHub - sokil/php-isocodes: PHP library providing ISO codes with localization: country (ISO 3166-1), subdivision (ISO 3166-2), language (ISO 639-3), currency (ISO 4217) and scripts (ISO 15924)

Thanks,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team

1 Like
5

Hi
Is there a way to disable Country drop down list itself?

7

Hi @Sai_Kiran_Sharma,

I see you’ve started a new post over here: Taiwan, Province of China: Is there a way to disable country list? - #2 by rcgillis

We can continue the conversation there, as this is an older post.

Best regards,

Roger
PKP Team