It started with a very simple question in the Slack Channel:

As it was me – both moderating on wordpress.tv, as well being once the leadorganizer of WordCamp Nuremberg and the WordPress Meetup Nürnberg … wait, wait … we are already in the middle of the confusion …

A short step back in history: when 2016 the first WordCamp in Nürnberg was announced during the application and approval process also the website and the url for the subdomain was setup. After a short confusion of getting to ” … burg” nuremberg.wordcamp.org was established. At that time a local Meetup (obviously) existed and was part of the WordPress Meetup programm named “WordPress Meetup Nürnberg”. Same already existed years earlier for “Köln” vs. “Cologne” which might be even the first to be exposed to this issue.

German umlauts can be part of a TLD, but are still quite rare and when it comes to the complete URL they simply don’t exist. The usual way to solve this is to write “ä” as “ae”, “ü” as “ue”, “ö” as “oe” and “ß” as “ss”. WordPress in german language setting does this by default when it comes to build the slug. Writing about the Cities of “Düsseldorf”, “Würzburg”, “München”, “Köln”, “Osnabrück” or “Nürnberg” therefore would be solved when the names appear in post-titles.

How to name them, when it comes to categories? Which is the case for publications on WordPress.tv which clusters videos by the location. Esp. with the naming conventions for URL namespaces in mind and the definition to use the english naming for events, regardless of the local name and – of course (see above about urls) of the local alphabet. At the moment we find different settings:

1. Local name and english name of the City is the same – the easy part. Just name it and of you go. True at least for all english speaking countries.
2. Local name and english name differ, but use the same alphabet. This is not only the case for German, but other languages based on the latin-alphabet. (en: Antwerp/be: Antwerpen). This case is tackled in different ways. Sometimes the local name is used (München, Würzburg, Norrköpping), sometimes the english one (Antwerp) and sometimes both exist as seperate categories (including some inconsistencies about the number of publications) side-by-side. Like for Köln/Cologne, Nürnberg/Nuremberg, which brings us back to our first question. But there’s more:
3. Local name and english name differ in alphabets used. This is true for all Cities in Countries using cyrilic, korean, hindi, chinese, kanji and other alphabets. At the moment all of these are written in the english.

Sidenote: as wordpress.tv is setup in english, the slugs don’t reflect the correct umlauts at all. “ü” is transformed to “u” instead of “ue”, etc.

My first impulse was to come up with a naming convention similar to the languages where “German/Deutsch” live side-by-side in one tag. I learned that exactly this going to change soon: http://wayback.fauppsala.se:80/wayback/20211001165728/https://make.wordpress.org/tv/2020/02/16/wordpress-tv-language-changes/

Second idea would be to use just english names, which – maybe due to my new Kenyan home – feels a bit “colonialistic”.

Just using local names might not be useful at all in a global context.

This said, my suggestion would still be to come up with a naming which reflects both the english and – where it applies – the local name in one category, even if this would include different alphabets. The categories name for cities therefore would be something like:

{english name}[/{local name in their respective alphabet}] 

for the title and

{english name}[-{local name in their correct transformation}]  

for the slug. This would melt down the usage of the a.m. double categories to one only each and still would give enough local flavour and identity. Coming back to our original question therefore would have “Nuremberg/Nürnberg” as one category. The slug should read “nuremberg-nuernberg”. Moscow e.g. would be “Moscow/Москва” by title and “moscow-Москва” for the slug.

All comments and ideas are very welcome!

#city, #proposal