Something for discussion with the PGC community.
There are many countries that have no regions - small islands, for example. There are many regions that have no counties, probably also small islands - its a geopolitical thing - there is no need to divide the land any smaller for administrative purposes. And there are some countries with a bit of a mix. New Zealand for example, consists of 3 regions, one of which has no counties (although I find it hard to consider the Chatham Islands as a "region").
But when it comes to challenge checkers, its a different matter. There are checkers that ask for a number of counties or regions and for some countries this results in no data, or in the above case of New Zealand, slightly confusing some people. Vatican City at least has one state, but has no counties. Monaco I suspect has no regions, but one has been provided (called "Monaco") in order to populate its counties.
So I have a proposal. Could countries that have no regions have one region auto-generated with the name of the country. After that, could regions with no counties get a county auto-generated using the name of the region. So a country with no regions would now have a region and a county, both named after the country. This, of course, would apply not just to geocheckers, but to everywhere in PGC.
I realise this may be difficult from a mapping bounds point of view, I am just hoping that if this proposal gains some support that PGC finds a way around this. (Copy the map data? Create some sort of arbitrary link that points to the parent data set?).
Then there is also the odd case of Antarctica which appears to be a region without a country, yet is treated as a country pretty much everywhere PGC.
And before you start upvoting or downvoting this - I appreciate this is not a problem in your country. Try to image what it would take for a checker to be consistant across the world.
I also realise that implementing this might cause questions down the line - "Nauru does not have any counties!!" But I suspect these will be few and far between as people will see them as default space fillers.
Your comments?
