From: George Zeigler [mailto:genz1968@mtu-net.ru] Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2002 9:51 PM
I think the Indonesia time abbreviations need to be corrected.
As a rule, the database uses English abbreviations for time zone names. This is partly to avoid controversy, as often the inhabitants of a region disagree (sometimes violently) about what the abbreviations should be. And it is partly due to limitations of the software, which has a limited character set repertoire. That is why we use English abbreviations for Indonesia, and for (almost) all other locations. It is up to local software to translate the abbreviations; this is currrently outside the scope of the tz database. There is an exception for Moscow; for reasons of historical compatibility with computer conventions that existed before the tz database, Moscow time uses the abbreviations MSK and MSD, which are neither English nor Russian Cyrillic (and which thus confuse both English and Russian readers :-). But I'd rather avoid future exceptions like that.
1. WIB stand for Waktu Indonesia bagian Barat (Western Indonesian Subtime), 7 hours ahead of GMT
I think "Waktu Indonesia Barat" is a bit more common in actual use, at least on the Web. I've translated it as "Western Indonesia Time" (WIT). Similarly for the other Indonesian time zones. I haven't seen an official translation for these time zone names. However, <http://www.murmur.nl/kamus/browse2.php?letter=W> translates it into Dutch as "West Indonesische tijd", which closely matches our English translation.