Tag The Map tells you how many countries your group has been to. That is a claim, and this page explains exactly how it is worked out, so you can judge it for yourself.
Two decisions, neither of them ours
Working out a country from a dropped pin takes two steps, and we make neither judgement ourselves.
- Which country a point falls in is decided by Natural Earth, the public-domain map dataset maintained by the cartographic community. We ship its country boundaries with the site and test each pin against them. We do not draw or adjust borders.
- What counts as a country is decided by ISO 3166-1, the international standard that assigns each country and territory a two-letter code. We do not add entries, remove them, or rename them.
Why we count 250 and not 195
You will often see 195 given as the number of countries in the world: the 193 member states of the United Nations, plus the Holy See and Palestine. Our list has 250 entries, and the difference is not a mistake.
ISO 3166-1 is a list of territories, not a list of sovereign states. It exists so that computers can agree on a code for a place, not to settle who governs it. It carries 249 officially assigned codes, and our data source adds Kosovo under a user-assigned code, which makes 250.
The extra entries are mostly places nobody disputes, but which are not independent countries:
- Overseas territories and crown dependencies such as Bermuda, Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands, Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man
- Territories of other states such as Guam, Puerto Rico, Greenland, French Guiana and Svalbard
- Special administrative regions such as Hong Kong and Macau
- Antarctica, which has a code, no permanent population and no government
So a pin in Guam counts as Guam rather than as the United States. That is the standard's answer, not ours, and it is why our number is higher than the one you may have in mind.
Why this means we take no position
Borders and statehood are genuinely contested in many parts of the world, and people hold those disagreements sincerely. We have deliberately built this so that Tag The Map never expresses a view.
The clearest way to see that the rule is mechanical is to look at what is missing. Northern Cyprus is not in our list, because ISO has not assigned it a code. Kosovo is, because our data source includes the code assigned to it. We did not weigh those two cases against each other, or against any other. We applied one rule and reported what it returned.
If a place appears in a way you would not have chosen, that is the standard and the map data speaking, not an opinion of ours. No offence is ever intended by any entry, or by any absence.
If something looks wrong
We store the latitude and longitude of every pin, and the country is worked out from those. Nothing is fixed permanently: if a data source corrects itself, we can recalculate what a pin resolves to. That is deliberate, and it is what lets us follow the sources rather than maintain our own view of the world.
If a place is resolving oddly, please tell us. Where the issue is in the underlying map data, the fix belongs with Natural Earth, and we are happy to point you at the right place.
Two things worth saying plainly
Boundaries near a border are approximate. The dataset we use is drawn for display at world scale, so a border can sit a few hundred metres from the legal line. A pin dropped within sight of a frontier may resolve to the country next door. We took that trade knowingly: it buys a lookup that is instant, works offline, and cannot fail or be rate-limited by somebody else's server.
A few places deliberately return no country at all. Where a territory is disputed and ISO 3166-1 gives it no code — Bir Tawil, the Siachen Glacier, the Spratly Islands and a handful of others — we would rather say nothing than pick a side. Pins well out to sea return nothing for the same reason.
Credits
Country boundaries come from Natural Earth, which is in the public domain. Map tiles come from OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence. Country codes, names and flags follow ISO 3166-1.