I’ve noticed that many smaller places (specifically from Croatia) are missing as options for author birthplace. I’ve just added Josip Hamm as my first contribution, but couldn’t add his birthplace, the village Gat near Valpovo. I tested a few other locations too and had the same issue, though the larger cities work fine.
So, is it sufficient to just leave the general birthplace, i.e. “Croatia”?
The village is found on OpenStreetMap, so it seems (to me as a non-programmer) like it could be relatively simple to just pull all the geographical data from OSM instead of using a less complete database.
Apologies if there’s some solution to this issue that I haven’t noticed, since I’m just starting out with contributing, but I couldn’t find anything in the help section.
I’m not too familiar with how BookBrainz areas work, but they might use the same list as MusicBrainz? (also can’t find Gat over there)
for now, I recommend you do two things
add Croatia as the author’s birthplace with more details in the annotation
follow the instructions on How to Add Areas to submit an area request ticket (be sure to note you need it for BookBrainz, in case it’s actually a different thing, tho I doubt we’d keep two lists)
I do like the idea of using OSM for area data. I’d tell you to create a ticket for that while you’re in there, but I’m not totally sure where you should put it…
