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community weblog	

War is God's way of teaching us geography; this site is also good

197 countries: 193 UN members, 2 non-member observers, Taiwan, and Kosovo.

Obligatory CGP Grey video.

This was built ...to get better at the daily Globle geography game...

How does the game decide what is a valid country?
Globle uses this framework to determine what constitutes a valid guess.

The border bugs, if you could call them that, showed up early. For example, the open-source dataset Train borrowed from the hosting service Github to create his game's globe came with country data attached. He only noticed after launch that the data displayed the disputed peninsula of Crimea in Ukraine as belonging to its current occupier, Russia. ("I talked to my brother who spent some time in Russia and knows the region well, and he said, 'Yeah, you should probably change it,'" Train said.) Other countries, such as Singapore, weren't even included.

Train junked the dataset for a more reputable one in the public domain, called Natural Earth, but user complaints kept piling up. The game's change log on GitHub reads like the diary of someone advancing their technical skills in between casting votes at the United Nations.

United States (not: United States of America)
Mexico (not: United Mexican States or Estados Unidos Mexicanos)

Country borders come from Natural Earth's admin-0 countries dataset.
The daily game uses a borderless hypsometric raster map built from Natural Earth imagery.

The country facts shown in Explore come from Wikidata (CC0), the World Bank Open Data (CC BY 4.0), Our World in Data (CC BY 4.0), the Observatory of Economic Complexity (Etalab v2.0), and the IMF World Economic Outlook (free reuse with attribution).

Western Sahara, formerly the colony of Spanish Sahara, is a disputed territory claimed by both the Kingdom of Morocco and the Polisario Front (Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and Río de Oro), which is an independence movement based in Tindouf. The annexation of Western Sahara by Morocco took place in two stages, in 1976 and 1979, and is considered illegal under international law.

Western Sahara is listed by the United Nations (UN) as a non-decolonized territory and is thus included in the United Nations list of non-self-governing territories, which regards Spain as the de jure administering state. Under international law, Western Sahara is not a legal part of Morocco, and it remains under the international laws of military occupation.

Francoist Spain previously colonized the territory as the Spanish Sahara until 1975, when the Spanish transition to democracy took effect. In 1976, when Spain attempted to transfer its administration to Morocco and Mauritania while ignoring a verdict of the International Court of Justice that those countries had no sovereignty over Western Sahara, a war erupted and the Polisario Front—a national liberation movement recognized by the United Nations as the legitimate representative of the people of Western Sahara—proclaimed the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) with a government-in-exile in Tindouf, Algeria. Mauritania withdrew its claims in 1979, and Morocco secured de facto control of most of the territory, including all major cities and most natural resources. A UN-sponsored ceasefire agreement was reached in 1991, though a planned referendum monitored by the UN's MINURSO mission has since stalled.

Approximately 30% of the Western Sahara is controlled by the Polisario Front and the remaining 70% is occupied by Morocco. Morocco maintains the Berm, a 2,700 km-long (1,700 mi) wall lined with land mines that splits the territory. The Polisario Front is primarily supported by Algeria and has received partial international recognition for the SADR and membership in the African Union. Morocco is supported by France and the United States; several states and the United Nations Security Council began expressing support for its autonomy proposal in the 2020s.