Data sources and citations

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Mind the Map covers 197 countries (193 UN member states, plus Vatican City, Kosovo, Taiwan and Palestine). This page documents where every fact in the trainer comes from, and cites the sources behind recent changes that older references still get wrong.

Which countries are included?

All 193 UN member states, plus Vatican City (UN observer) and the three non-member territories quizzes most often ask about: Kosovo, Taiwan and Palestine (UN observer). Their inclusion reflects how commonly they appear in geography reference works and quizzes, not a position on their political status.

Base country dataset

Country names, capitals, regions and coordinates come from mledoze/countries (ODbL licence) and samayo/country-json.

Populations

Population figures are the World Bank total population indicator (SP.POP.TOTL), 2024 values. This includes Kosovo and Palestine (reported by the World Bank as "West Bank and Gaza"). Two exceptions the World Bank does not track: Vatican City (825, retained from the base dataset) and Taiwan, whose figure (23,400,220, end of 2024) comes from Taiwan's Ministry of the Interior household registration statistics.

Official languages

The language list for each country was reviewed in July 2026 against each country's constitution or current language legislation, and every entry was cross-checked against the CIA World Factbook languages field via the community-maintained factbook.json mirror (the Factbook itself was retired in 2025; the per-country links below point to archived snapshots of its pages). Where the Factbook lags a recent legal change (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Moldova), the cited legislation or reporting above is treated as authoritative. The first language listed for a country is its primary or most representative official language; additional listed languages are also accepted as correct answers.

Where a language is widely spoken but has no official status at the national level (for example Jamaican Patois, or Russian in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan), it is not treated as a correct answer. Recent legal changes that older sources still get wrong, with citations:

Spotted an error? Tell me via jackhobbs.dev and I'll fix it with a source.

Country-by-country notes

Every country where the trainer's language list deviates from the raw upstream dataset, or where a display choice needed a judgement call, with the source for that decision. The CIA World Factbook was retired in 2025, so links point to fixed Internet Archive snapshots of its country pages (captured late 2024 to early 2025). Countries not listed here use the base dataset unchanged.

Flags, map and icons

Flag images are from lipis/flag-icons (MIT). The world map is from flekschas/simple-world-map (CC-BY-SA 3.0). Icons are from Lucide (ISC).