After finishing up Italian data last night for the Iron Curtain I have a good overview on about 40% of the person database I think. Italian data is about 10% of that btw… And with Yugoslav and Soviet data you are on to 20% already. Looking at the data I am seeing some trouble for this project. And no, it’s not size. The issue is more about immigration.
I picked Finland and The Netherlands on purpose. The Netherlands as it has a mix of immigrants and colonial history that makes for a varied palette of people that have the Dutch nationality or second nationality. I picked Finland as its name base is quite specific, so easier to check. Helps that I have some interest in the country and have travelled there up into the North Pole circle. It’s cold there in May…
Looking at the European nations, cultural boundaries (which for my purpose usually end up in language and name based boundaries) are easy to set. In Asia this is less easy in the west and becomes easier going eastwards. Africa is a different story, but colonial language (English, French, Portuguese, etc)and local naming customs help to differentiate, but then you come to the nations that these days contain mostly immigrants, which comes down to pretty much the whole of the Americas (except for the Caribbean), Australia and New Zealand. There are two ways to go about, honour the history and leave it as is, pick a ‘goal’ and clean up everything that is different (which in my case just means those people get a different nationality) or pick a solution in between, which would mean picking a base language/culture and adjust the different ones to a certain extent. This would lead to new made up (but close to realistic) naming conventions for instance.
These are the good thoughts about the project btw, because it appeals to creativity. I have over 700 hours in the editor since release (count out how many hours a day on average that is ) and sometimes things are just dull data editing. These culture and language things are more interesting.