# Vlad / Countries — data and image credits

Collection prepared 27 September 2026. A dated educational reference, not a live population counter.

## Scope and grouping

197 cards: the 193 United Nations members, Vatican City (the Holy See has observer status), Palestine, Taiwan and Kosovo. Taiwan and Kosovo carry explanatory status notes. Dependencies and other disputed entities are outside this chosen collection. See https://www.un.org/en/about-us and https://www.un.org/en/node/123012.

Six geographic groups follow the reference dataset: Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America and Oceania. Central America and the Caribbean are included in North America. Transcontinental countries appear once: Russia in Europe; Türkiye, Kazakhstan, Cyprus, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia in Asia; Egypt in Africa. These are learning groups, not statements about political or cultural affiliation. Antarctica has no sovereign countries.

## Reference data

- Country codes, reference areas and initial geographic/capital fields: https://github.com/mledoze/countries (ODbL). Raw snapshot: base-countries.json. The unMember field is not used as a definitive membership count; the explicit scope above controls the collection.
- Ukrainian country names: Unicode CLDR, https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr-json (Unicode License V3). Snapshot: cldr-uk.json.
- Capital names in English, Ukrainian and German: linked Wikipedia language editions, collected through MediaWiki langlinks. The underlying page titles and Wikidata identifiers are retained in capital-labels.json. Wikipedia textual content is available under CC BY-SA; titles are used as place-name references.
- Capital exceptions and recent changes are explicitly annotated on each relevant card. Notably Ciudad de la Paz, Equatorial Guinea (January 2026); Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte; South Africa; Eswatini; Nauru; Switzerland; Palestine; and Indonesia. Capital transfers and disputed statuses can evolve after this edition.
- Population: World Bank SP.POP.TOTL latest non-null observation per country, fetched from https://api.worldbank.org/v2/country/all/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?format=json&mrnev=1&per_page=500 . API release last updated 13 July 2026. Actual observation year is shown on each card. Kosovo uses World Bank code XKX. Snapshot: worldbank-population.json. Estimates are not all from the same year or methodology.
- Taiwan: Department of Household Registration, end of December 2025, 23,299,132 registered residents. https://www.ris.gov.tw/info-liferay/app/channel/newsEnglishDetail/26245250
- Vatican City: 882 residents at 31 December 2024. https://www.vaticanstate.va/en/state-and-government/general-informations/population.html
- Areas are reference total areas from the geographic dataset and may use different territorial definitions from population estimates. Do not calculate precise densities from these mixed sources.
- Flags: locally stored PNG images from https://flagcdn.com, API and source documentation https://flagpedia.net/download/api. Flags reflect that source's current representations at collection time; no operating-system flag emoji are used in the exercises.

## Photographs

All 197 landmarks have a real, locally stored photograph. Individual original-image pages, authors and license labels are in landmarks.json and in each revealed card under “Sources & photo credit”. Images were resized (maximum edge 640 px) and converted to WebP; no depicted landmarks were generated or altered. Derivatives retain their source license. Follow the original file page for the applicable full license and upload history. Two photographs (CF and SC) use the Free Art License; other photographs use Creative Commons or public-domain terms. Some remote natural landmarks use aerial/satellite images; the Solomon Islands card uses a historical photograph.

License references: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ ; https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ ; https://artlibre.org/licence/lal/en/ ; https://opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1-0/ ; https://www.unicode.org/license.txt .

The combined educational data is available in countries.json with source links retained. Geographic data derived from mledoze/countries is shared under ODbL; image licenses remain separate. Attribution does not imply endorsement.

## World overview and languages (added 27 September 2026)

The world map uses Natural Earth's public-domain 1:110m land polygons, with no political borders: https://www.naturalearthdata.com/downloads/110m-physical-vectors/110m-land/ . Source geometry is retained in world-land.geojson, downloaded from the Natural Earth maintainer's repository: https://github.com/nvkelso/natural-earth-vector/blob/master/geojson/ne_110m_land.geojson . License: https://www.naturalearthdata.com/about/terms-of-use/ . It is an equirectangular world overview, not an equal-area map. Marker and coastline use the same coordinate projection. The point represents an approximate location, not a capital or the country's territorial extent. Small islands may be omitted at this scale. Coordinates and regional fields derive from the existing mledoze reference snapshot, with corrected Kuwait and Fiji marker positions and explicit regional descriptions for transcontinental countries.

Language lists are selected languages used in the country, not exhaustive inventories, speaker rankings or a claim that every listed language has identical legal status. They derive from the country reference snapshot. Corrections and supplementary sources: Austria (German), https://www.bmeia.gv.at/oev-wien/about-austria/fast-facts ; Switzerland, https://www.aboutswitzerland.eda.admin.ch/en/languages-and-dialects ; Moldova (Romanian), https://www.moldpres.md/eng/politics/romania-welcomes-inclusion-of-phrase-romanian-language-in-all-laws-of-moldova ; Rwanda, https://www.gov.rw/about ; South African Sign Language, https://www.gov.za/news/speeches/president-cyril-ramaphosa-signing-ceremony-south-african-sign-language-bill-19-jul . Each card links its language source.