Timezone translations

[Mark Davis]

> in the countries concerned. How did this completely bogus Europe/London
> data for English get through that process?

We seeded the project with a set of data that hadn't gone through this
process yet, so it hadn't gone through the same level of vetting. We have
put out 2 releases since this project was adopted by the Unicode consortium
(it was previously sponsored by the Linux Application Development
Environment (aka LADE) Workgroup of the Free Standards Group's OpenI18N
(formerly known as Linux Internationalization Initiative or Li18nux) team.

I gather from a previous message that you knew of this problem, but were
scared off (or simply annoyed) by our bug form; too bad, because we could
have fixed the problem earlier. We have to fix the bug form if it is keeping
knowledgeable people from reporting problems.

We are faced with a huge amount of data, and part of our process has been to
try to get tools in place to make it easier to people both to submit data
and to vet it. To that end, we've been working on a tool
(http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/cldr-survey/) that lets us get access to
data more easily. For example, en_GB is here:
http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/cldr-survey?_=en_GB

> If I find that the tiny subset of CLDR data that I know about is so
> wrong why should I trust any of the rest of it without some explanation
> of why the bit I know about is wrong?

Interestingly, it is often more difficult for us to get good vetting of data
for English countries than it is for more 'exotic' ones like Finnish or
Farsi.

‎Mark

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter Ilieve" <peter at aldie.co.uk>
To: <tz at lecserver.nci.nih.gov>
Sent: Monday, June 06, 2005 01:07
Subject: Re: Timezone translations


> On 6 Jun 2005, at 01:23, Mark Davis wrote:
>
> >> Finally, I'll repeat the question from my first mail about this,
> >> which
> >> I forgot to add to my last mail: where did the current data for
> >> Europe/London in the en_timezones.html come from?
> >>
> >
> > I would have to wade back through all the checkins to see where it
> > came
> > from. Frankly, since it looks like it is wrong anyway, it is not a
> > particularly good use of time.
>
> I disagree. There is a set of slides (in PowerPoint format, so much
> for open
> standards) giving an overview of CLDR linked from <http://
> www.unicode.org/cldr/>.
> Slides 14 and 15 describe a vetting process, which strongly encourages
> references to external sources and mentions consultation with contacts
> in the countries concerned. How did this completely bogus Europe/London
> data for English get through that process?
>
> It looks to me as though someone just took the data for America/New_York
> and did s/Eastern/British/g;s/E/B/g. That's the simplest explanation of
> how it ended up with BT and BDT, terms never used in the UK, and with
> BST
> as the term for the wrong sort of time. Can you demonstrate otherwise?
>
> If I find that the tiny subset of CLDR data that I know about is so
> wrong why should I trust any of the rest of it without some explanation
> of why the bit I know about is wrong?
>
>
>          Peter Ilieve        peter at aldie.co.uk
>
>
>