[tz] Spelling of Ukrainian cities #KyivNotKiev

Fri May 10 23:04:14 UTC 2019

I just realized my reply before was just to the original email.  I will
quote it below, but one of the things I ran into was searching for Kiev on
the Guardian's website still returns old news stories, and advertisements
so it looks like there has been no news for Kiev for over a year.  When
sites make the change, they should link for searching the previous usage.

Also it was transliterated from both Ukrainian and Russian to Kiev until
new transliteration guidelines were published by the government in the
early 1990's, and the Ukrainian government started using it in 1995.

Here is my previous reply:

What you see picking your time zone in an app or operating system is set by
> that app or operating system downstream of tzdb.   For example
> America/Los_Angeles is replaced by a different city in the time zone on
> many systems.   You also don't see the underscore in many apps.  Just like
> they can omit the underscore or use a different city name, individual apps
> and operating systems could use Kyiv.  When procuring computers your
> government could request or require in the contract that the vendor follow
> the governments naming convention. This can lead to the change carrying
> over to consumer software/hardware from the same vendors.
>

When a change is made to tzdb, it can potentially break every system
> downstream of it. It makes more sense for systems downstream to change.
> Examples go both ways.  Yes, the Guardian has changed it in their style
> guide.  That change was less than a year ago, and their search should link
> the two spellings.  Otherwise it might look like nothing news worthy from
> the Ukraine if you search their site.  The site search brought up several
> ads for travel to Kiev or Kiev hotels. The most recent usage was just less
> than a year ago -
> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/29/russian-journalist-arkady-babchenko-shot-dead-in-kiev
> BBC is using Kiev still in a news story as of today -
> https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/48206280
> NY Times used Kiev on May 1 is another story -
> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/biden-son-ukraine.html
> I didn't go past the paywall to see which one the WSJ used -
> https://blogs.wsj.com/frontiers/2019/04/28/this-week-on-the-frontiers-9 but
> was presented with an ad for a travel site advertising Kiev hotel
> bookings.  Unlike the Guardian it wasn't in the search results, but it did
> appear on the page.
> Washington Post -
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/05/07/us-ambassador-ukraine-is-recalled-after-becoming-political-target/
> In addition to comparing google results, I think those news organizations
> have a fairly wide readership and make a decent benchmark.  The majority
> appear to still be using Kiev.

On Fri, May 10, 2019 at 3:56 PM Lester Caine <lester at lsces.uk> wrote:

> On 09/05/2019 07:07, Vitaliy Stavropolskiy wrote:
> > Maybe Kiev is more popular for exUSSR population and the rest of the
> world
>
> This is something of a chicken and egg problem. If every system use of
> Kiev was replaced with Kyiv then the 'popularity' may change, but it
> will result in problems with linking to other well established uses of
> Kiev in the rest of the system. Dictating something happens is not the
> best was of making it happen. Feet and pounds have not been 'the
> standard' in the UK since 1965 and various bans have come and gone yet
> even young people will still use imperial units today. And here in the
> UK Kiev is still Kiev ;)
>
> In terms of translating names from one base to another, hindsight is a
> wonderful thing and perhaps it would have been better if the rules
> stored in TZ had been identified by numbers from the start which is the
> other solution to this problem that keeps bubbling up, but the current
> identification tags are used everywhere to PROVIDE links to all sorts of
> other translations and continually changing them does nothing to keep
> the underlying base stable hence the general consensus to maintain the
> status quo INTERNALLY. But again people are now entrenched using the TZ
> names in a way they are not intended to be use.
>
> --
> Lester Caine - G8HFL
> -----------------------------
> Contact - https://lsces.uk/wiki/Contact
> L.S.Caine Electronic Services - https://lsces.uk
> Model Engineers Digital Workshop - https://medw.co.uk
> Rainbow Digital Media - https://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk
>
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