country code for United Kingdom

[Marc]

Hi

A couple of geonames users have suggested to change the country code for
the United Kingdom from UK to GB. If no objections are voiced I will do
so these days. The search will still continue to accept UK for GB.
The official iso country code is GB, so there is a strong reason to use it.
We have used UK as it is a reserved code in iso and it is more widely
used. It is kind of not intuitive to use the code GB for the United
Kingdom as it seems like an abbreviation for Great Britain (not
including Northern Ireland). It is also interesting to note that
Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man have their own iso codes, whereas
Northern Ireland has not and is included in the iso code GB.

Marc

[Xin]

Hi Marc,

I personally think UK is a much more widely used, and is a more
suitable choice. I didn't know about the iso being GB untill now
though.

We play with a lot of country data here, and United Kingdom's country
code is always UK. For this reason, I would much prefer it stayed as
this for Geonames.

Cheers,
Xin

[xavi.c...@gmail.com]

I am one of the geonames users that asked Marc to change the country
code for the United Kingdom. My reasoning is that if there's already
one standard (the ISO) and geonames uses it for the list of countries,
then I think that ignoring the standard for some specific countries
only contributes to confusion (I was confused, because I was told that
the codes of the countries were the ISO codes).

Also, doing this exception would probably open the door to other cases,
and I don't think the geonames project (please correct me if I'm wrong)
should invest resources in creating another list of country codes. It's
not the goal of the project. Let's leave this discussion for the ISO.

Just my opinion.

Cheers,

xavi

[Xin]

I have started to use the ISO names since my previous message. I now
agree with the change. It's good to stick to the standard.

[Marc]

Glad so see we all agree now and I can change it this weekend.

Marc

[Barry Hunter]

(late to this discussion)

Just to say I agree to change it to use the standard, makes sense. (but IIRC
you said that you would make it that you can still specify UK and it would
know you meant GB ;)

Barry

[Marc]

The country code for the UK has been changed to GB this afternoon.
The new iso codes for Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man are still GB
and have not yet been changed to their respective ISO codes JE,GG and
IM. This change is still on the geonames to do list.

Marc