Contested Regions
Last Updated: 17th Jan 2017By Jolyon Ralph
As a worldwide mineralogical database with contributors from many countries we often have to deal with political disagreements over contested regions or areas regarded as 'frozen conflicts'.
In order to avoid taking any overtly political viewpoint within mindat.org, we have decided on the following rule to define how a region is listed within our political hierarchy.
Our primary concern is not to appease a political viewpoint, but simply to report on the reality of control of a region - on the basis that if a mineralogical excursion to the region is planned, which authority would be responsible for granting access.
At the same time, we do not want to constantly update our site with changes after minor border skirmishes and military occupations. We would not, for example, have wanted to incorporate Kuwait into Iraq immediately after August 1990. So our rule is defined as:
Any region that has declared independence or has declared that it is now integrated into another country will be moved immediately into its own (or the other country's) hierarchy if that decision has received wide international support (for example, a United Nations resolution.) In cases where such a change is either unilateral or has not received wide international support (for example, with the Russian annexation of Crimea), we will wait five years from the date of the change before implementing the change in mindat.org, to ensure that such a change is a permanent political reality.
This would mean that, assuming no change in the political situation, Crimea will be moved from Ukraine to Russia on mindat.org in March 2019.
Under no circumstances should our definition of regions be regarded as political support for the status of a region, it is purely to record the reality of control of a region based on our formal rule as outlined above.
It is possible with our new non-hierarchical locality system to build alternative political hierarchies that contain regions with a different political viewpoint (for example, a map could be created now for Russia that includes Crimea, if it is requested) but these will not be part of our official locality hierarchy.
In order to avoid taking any overtly political viewpoint within mindat.org, we have decided on the following rule to define how a region is listed within our political hierarchy.
Our primary concern is not to appease a political viewpoint, but simply to report on the reality of control of a region - on the basis that if a mineralogical excursion to the region is planned, which authority would be responsible for granting access.
At the same time, we do not want to constantly update our site with changes after minor border skirmishes and military occupations. We would not, for example, have wanted to incorporate Kuwait into Iraq immediately after August 1990. So our rule is defined as:
Any region that has declared independence or has declared that it is now integrated into another country will be moved immediately into its own (or the other country's) hierarchy if that decision has received wide international support (for example, a United Nations resolution.) In cases where such a change is either unilateral or has not received wide international support (for example, with the Russian annexation of Crimea), we will wait five years from the date of the change before implementing the change in mindat.org, to ensure that such a change is a permanent political reality.
This would mean that, assuming no change in the political situation, Crimea will be moved from Ukraine to Russia on mindat.org in March 2019.
Under no circumstances should our definition of regions be regarded as political support for the status of a region, it is purely to record the reality of control of a region based on our formal rule as outlined above.
It is possible with our new non-hierarchical locality system to build alternative political hierarchies that contain regions with a different political viewpoint (for example, a map could be created now for Russia that includes Crimea, if it is requested) but these will not be part of our official locality hierarchy.
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