A lot of people think that this happens and don’t mark their home countries as visited..
This applies to almost all new users and users who mainly use one of the other sites, such as 43 things.
I don’t see that this should be a problem since you choose your residence out of already existing places and the request to mark it as visited could be sent at the same time as you choose it..
An idea which has been around for a while and shouldn’t be too hard to implement.. right?
It could also be a question posed at the updated screen which comes after the “worth doing” if that would be easier to implement.. (“Was [parent] worth doing too?”)
Been with you on this since you first suggested it. For those of us who are also trying to take care of non-English named areas it can be a real headache to hold up the current policy.
I think that if this would be implemented it would save a lot of work for people correcting problems and provide for a more streamlined site.
It might also give users a chance to personalize their interface a little (with choices such as “view places in [English]” / “view local names”) which again would increase popularity – since users love personalization :)
Places which have but one name, or don’t have a translation into your chosen language could also be marked with a star.
Each name could be added similarly to when one adds an attachment to an email, with a small box to the side from which you could choose what language to mark it as. A small field below the names could allow you to choose which name could be considered the original.
For the more problematic places one could just choose [ English (default) ].
Now that there are even 43places in other languages than English I think this is really becoming quite pressing..