Swaziland/eSwatini concern

I think we are doing a disservice to new collectors who come to Numista and look for the country "Swaziland" which is written on their coin or banknote. They should be able to find a country called "Swaziland." And now that there are new coins and notes that actually say, "eSwatini," I think it is weird that we have listings for some notes that say Swaziland, and others that say eSwatini, and that they are both found under and in listings for eSwatini.

I wish this was not so. In all fairness, I do not like it when we do it with Ceylon/Sri Lanka, or Irian Jiah/Indonesia...do we do that with Scotland, Northern Ireland, Englad, and the United Kingdom? I am not sure...but it does not seem user friendly.

As a professional educator there is something to be said for a website keeping up with the current names of countries. It provides credibility as a research source. This website does a good job with presenting a professional academic listing of Geographic entities. It does assume that people are educated and keep up to date with current geopolitical boundaries.

With that being said, I know that making that assumption is a dangerous thing to do as with all assumptions. If you listed out all the name changes of countries and such for people to find things more easily, I think it would get harder as there would be more listings to dig through.

The search function should lead collectors to the listings they are looking for under their current names. In that regard, this website becomes a teaching tool as well.

I applaud the fact that eSwatini is the go to name on this website. A similar case is North Macedonia.

The thing that I don't get though is why Bahamas, Gambia, Netherlands and USA not listed under "t" as all of those countries begin with the word "The". Wait, I get that, but why then do we find El Salvador listed under "E" when El is Spanish for "The"? Cabo Verde is translated to Cape Verde and Cote D'Ivoire is translated to Ivory Coast and not even The Ivory Coast. Why? Why? Why?

Bottom line. I think your concern is legitimate and maybe there should be something changed to better "advertise" the search function in case people are not aware of what happens in the news.

I've found myself deeply upset by the recent catalogue adjustments for Ceylon/Sri Lanka, Belgian Congo/DRC, etc. The problem is that it shakes the foundations of how I deal with my collection and I know I'm not the only user here who feels that way.

I think the top-level country should have the current name. This has been done, and works perfectly well, for other countries on Numista:


What I'd like to see in this case is:

eSwatini
-- Swaziland
-- eSwatini

This, I think, would be an excellent pattern to follow when dealing with significant name changes to national entities. I wouldn't apply it to very technical cases in which the name by which the country is generally known does not change, but for Siam/Thailand, Ceylon/Sri Lanka, Burma/Myanmar, etc., I think it would work perfectly. I believe it is of absolutely fundamental importance for new collectors to be able to find their coins easily based on generally accepted, rather than strictly formal, country names. Since the Numista team invented this approach themselves, I don't know why we have to change it now to this obfuscation.

Citeer: "andrewdotcoza"​I've found myself deeply upset by the recent catalogue adjustments for Ceylon/Sri Lanka, Belgian Congo/DRC, etc. The problem is that it shakes the foundations of how I deal with my collection and I know I'm not the only user here who feels that way.
​
​I think the top-level country should have the current name. This has been done, and works perfectly well, for other countries on Numista:
​
​
​What I'd like to see in this case is:
​
​eSwatini
​-- Swaziland
​-- eSwatini
​
​This, I think, would be an excellent pattern to follow when dealing with significant name changes to national entities. I wouldn't apply it to very technical cases in which the name by which the country is generally known does not change, but for Siam/Thailand, Ceylon/Sri Lanka, Burma/Myanmar, etc., I think it would work perfectly. I believe it is of absolutely fundamental importance for new collectors to be able to find their coins easily based on generally accepted, rather than strictly formal, country names. Since the Numista team invented this approach themselves, I don't know why we have to change it now to this obfuscation.

​Agreed and couldnt have said it better, however admin seem to have stopped listening to the people who are using their website...

Citeer: "andrewdotcoza"​I've found myself deeply upset by the recent catalogue adjustments for Ceylon/Sri Lanka, Belgian Congo/DRC, etc. The problem is that it shakes the foundations of how I deal with my collection and I know I'm not the only user here who feels that way.
​
​I think the top-level country should have the current name. This has been done, and works perfectly well, for other countries on Numista:
​
​
​What I'd like to see in this case is:
​
​eSwatini
​-- Swaziland
​-- eSwatini
​
​This, I think, would be an excellent pattern to follow when dealing with significant name changes to national entities. I wouldn't apply it to very technical cases in which the name by which the country is generally known does not change, but for Siam/Thailand, Ceylon/Sri Lanka, Burma/Myanmar, etc., I think it would work perfectly. I believe it is of absolutely fundamental importance for new collectors to be able to find their coins easily based on generally accepted, rather than strictly formal, country names. Since the Numista team invented this approach themselves, I don't know why we have to change it now to this obfuscation.

​The example of Zimbabwe here may not be the best for what you're arguing for. These names don't reflect mere changes of naming convention, but major political and/or territorial changes. The change in naming between Siam/Thailand, to use another of your examples, doesn't meet this same criteria. The ruling authority didn't change, nor did the physical composition of the country. Just the name. To introduce entirely new subcategories because of a name change would seem to require a lot of arbitrary recategorization that doesn't match the historical record or lived experience of the relevant countries. It would also seem to carry the implication that the countries themselves don't get a say in what they call themselves (which has all sorts of difficult cultural/historical issues associated with it).

But the underlying problem of search searching for coins is a valid concern. It seems to me that the answer might be an adjustment to how search results function like blue-m has suggested (searches for Swaziland automatically return results for eSwatini, for example).

Citeer: "seltsamesammler"​​​The example of Zimbabwe here may not be the best for what you're arguing for. These names don't reflect mere changes of naming convention, but major political and/or territorial changes. The change in naming between Siam/Thailand, to use another of your examples, doesn't meet this same criteria. The ruling authority didn't change, nor did the physical composition of the country. Just the name. To introduce entirely new subcategories because of a name change would seem to require a lot of arbitrary recategorization that doesn't match the historical record or lived experience of the relevant countries. It would also seem to carry the implication that the countries themselves don't get a say in what they call themselves (which has all sorts of difficult cultural/historical issues associated with it).
​
​But the underlying problem of search searching for coins is a valid concern. It seems to me that the answer might be an adjustment to how search results function like blue-m has suggested (searches for Swaziland automatically return results for eSwatini, for example).

​But search works fine. That isn't the issue. You can search for Ceylon and Sri Lanka comes up.

Zimbabwe is exactly the best example for what I'm arguing. Consider what has happened to the DRC. The Belgian Congo used to be its own country here. Now it is folded into the DRC. The political change between the Belgian Congo and the DRC was momentous - far more so than the change from Rhodesia to Zimbabwe because it involved a secessionist province and an immediate civil war. And furthermore, there was much more of a territorial change in the case of the DRC than there was in the case of the transition between Rhodesia and Zimbabwe because of the administration of Rwanda and Burundi by the Belgian Congo government.

My whole argument against these changes is that they are already arbitrary. They are not even applied consistently throughout the catalogue. And I don't think that consistency is possible, to be honest. People need to use the catalogue in a way that is meaningful to them. That means having full access to the country names they are used to dealing with, but having those names groups together logically under whatever their successor states are.

I think that the names of states are important. That is the identity we get off the money and it tells us something about the history of the place the money comes from. From time to time, states will change their names and that is, to the outside world, far more significant than knowledge of a change of government. If you live there, then the change of government is obviously far more important but, the vast majority of national territories are foreign countries for everyone on Numista. We need to have the names by which foreigners know the country available.

I don't mean by this that we should trample anyone's national identity. A name change from Swaziland to eSwatini is for the nation itself to decide upon. Similarly, many countries have different names in different languages. Germany isn't Germany in Germany. And in France, Germany is "Allemagne". But this isn't relevant because nobody is insisting that we call Sri Lanka "Ceylon".

What I want is that when I find a banknote that says "Swaziland", I can find it easily in the catalogue and I can pull up a list of other notes I might want that say "Swaziland". What is wrong with this change is that I can no longer search for Swaziland in the My Banknotes (or My Coins) section. And that is also confusing because what are there two searches that look so similar on screen, but behave so completely differently?

It isn't the role of Numista to force me to use the most recent approved country names for the sections in my collection and, unfortunately, these recent changes have that effect because I cannot isolate my Belgian Congo coins from the DRC. That makes it hard for collectors, especially new collectors why might not know the history of many places they have coins from. I think we should be sensitive to the historical categories used in publications like Krause because people have been following their arrangement for decades, and there will be people following that arrangement for years to come. But we can do that while still grouping historical names together under the modern name of the relevant state. There is an easy solution here that will not only suit everyone, but is already in place in more sections of the catalogue than there are vandalised sections like Sri Lanka and the DRC.