About the country data

Every sentence on the country pages is generated from one dataset — there is no hand-written copy that can quietly drift from the numbers. This page says where that dataset comes from and which editorial calls it bakes in.

Which countries get a page

The 193 UN member states plus the two UN observer states, Vatican City and Palestine: 195 pages. Kosovo, Taiwan and Western Sahara do not get pages — their status is genuinely disputed, and a geography game is not the place where that gets adjudicated. For the same reason, borders with them are left out of their neighbours’ counts rather than counted one way or the other, which is why Morocco lists one land neighbour and Serbia seven.

Land borders

Border counts are land borders only, taken from Natural Earth’s 1:50m map — two countries border each other where their shapes share an arc. Two further rules:

• Border Blitz asks about a border only where both countries sit on the same continent’s map — a border across two maps is on neither of them. These pages list those borders anyway, and say that they span two maps: Egypt lists Israel and Palestine, and Indonesia lists Papua New Guinea. Spain’s Ceuta and Melilla, on the Moroccan coast, are not counted as a border for either country.
• Zambia and Botswana meet at the Kazungula quadripoint, and whether that is a border at all is genuinely argued over — so it is not counted.

Population and area

Population is the World Bank’s SP.POP.TOTL series, each country at its own most recent published year (currently 2025 data). The World Bank publishes no figure for Vatican City, so its page shows none rather than a guess. Area is from the world-countries dataset, in square kilometres, as the dataset reports it, except Serbia: Kosovo’s area comes off its total, so the figure matches the map and the population.

Capitals

Each country has exactly one capital in the quizzes — the one its page shows in large type. Where reality is less tidy — the role split across cities (South Africa, Bolivia, the Netherlands, Eswatini, Sri Lanka, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Burundi, Malaysia, Tanzania), a move still under way (Equatorial Guinea), a claimed or disputed capital (Palestine, Israel), or no official capital at all (Nauru) — the page carries a note saying so, and the quiz keeps accepting the one standard answer.

Currencies and languages

Both come from the world-countries dataset, corrected where it has fallen behind (Bulgaria’s euro, Sierra Leone’s new leone). Where several currencies circulate, the page names the main day-to-day one. Official languages are listed as the dataset names them, with corrections to constitutional names and to languages it lists as official that are not; past three languages the page counts the rest instead of naming them.

Transcontinental countries

Seven countries sit on two continents — Russia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia and Cyprus. They appear on both continents’ maps and both continent lists; their page’s map is drawn from the first of the two.

Flags

The flags are Twemoji artwork, used under CC-BY 4.0, served as a font so that every device draws the same flag — Windows has none of its own.

Licences

Contains information from world-countries, which is made available under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0. Population data: World Bank, SP.POP.TOTL, under CC BY 4.0. Borders and shapes: Natural Earth, public domain.

When this was last updated

The dataset is regenerated from its sources by script, never edited by hand, and every page is rebuilt from it on each deploy. Current data snapshot: 2025. If a number on a country page is wrong, it is wrong here first — tell us and the fix lands on all 195 pages at once.