Everything on GuessGlobe — the country list, the capital answers, every claim in our long-form articles — comes from somewhere. This page documents where. It also explains how we handle disagreements between sources, how we correct mistakes, and what we will and will not publish.
Geography quizzes are easy to fake. You can grab a Wikipedia table, paste it into a database, and ship a working game in an afternoon. We did not want to ship that. Borders, names, and capitals are politically sensitive; tier-list articles age badly; and a "trusted educational tool" with no audit trail is not actually trusted. So we wrote down what we do, in plain language, and pinned it on a public page. If something on the site contradicts what is below, the page below wins — please tell us.
GuessGlobe lists 195 countries. That figure is the 193 full member states of the United Nations plus the two permanent non-member observer states recognised by the General Assembly — Vatican City (the Holy See) and Palestine. We chose the UN list because it is the only widely accepted, regularly updated, politically neutral roster of sovereign states. We do not list Taiwan, Kosovo, Western Sahara, Northern Cyprus, Somaliland, Transnistria, or other partially recognised entities in the headline 195 figure, though several of them appear in our long-form articles where context warrants. This is a cartographic choice, not a political one. People disagree in good faith about each of these cases; the UN list lets us be consistent without taking sides.
Map geometry comes from Natural Earth 1:50m and 1:110m datasets, a public-domain cartography project maintained by a global community of volunteer cartographers and used by major news organisations, including the New York Times graphics desk and most modern data journalism teams. We use Natural Earth's "Admin 0 — Countries" layer for the game globe and its higher-resolution variants for the static maps in our articles. Where Natural Earth represents a disputed border with a hashed line, we preserve that representation rather than asserting one side or the other.
The capital answer for each country comes from a three-tier hierarchy. First, the country's own official government gazette, where one is available in English, French, Spanish, German, or any language the team reads. Second, the UN Statistics Division profile for that country. Third, the public-domain CIA World Factbook, used as a tie-breaker. Where the three sources agree, we publish without comment. Where they disagree — usually because a country has multiple capitals, or has moved its capital and the move has not yet propagated to every dataset — we annotate the discrepancy in the article body and pick the answer that matches the country's own statement. South Africa (Pretoria, Cape Town, Bloemfontein), Bolivia (Sucre and La Paz), and the Netherlands (Amsterdam and The Hague) are the recurring complicated cases; each is covered in our capitals guide.
Articles in the Learn hub are written and edited by the GuessGlobe team. Every article goes through a four-step process before publication:
datePublished and a dateModified in the page metadata and a visible "Last updated" line under the headline. When facts in an article change — for example, when a country renames its capital — we update the article and bump dateModified.We do not commission articles from freelancers. We do not run articles ghost-written by AI tools end-to-end. We do use AI assistance for routine tasks like outline brainstorming, copy-editing for tone and grammar, and generating illustration drafts that are then redrawn by hand, but every published claim is written by a human team member, sourced to a primary document, and signed off by a second human. If we ever change that policy we will say so on this page.
Articles like our toughest-geography-questions piece are inherently subjective. We mark them as such in the article body and explain our reasoning. Tier lists and "hardest" lists are opinions backed by argument, not facts; we present the criteria openly so readers can disagree. We do not publish click-bait tier lists in the form of "Top 10 X" articles with no editorial rationale.
Country names, borders, and capital cities are politically sensitive in many cases — Israel and Palestine, Taiwan and the People's Republic of China, Ukraine and Russia, Kosovo and Serbia, India and Pakistan, Cyprus, and others. On GuessGlobe:
We get things wrong. Every error reported through the Contact form is investigated. If the report is accurate we update the article, bump dateModified, and add a one-line correction note at the foot of the affected page describing what we changed and when. Substantial corrections are flagged inline ("Updated 27 May 2026 to reflect Kazakhstan's reversion of its capital name from Nur-Sultan to Astana.") rather than silently rewritten. Accuracy matters more than looking infallible.
As described above, we use AI assistance for outlining, copy-editing, and image drafting. We do not publish AI-generated articles wholesale. If we ever publish AI-generated long-form material, it will be labelled as such at the top of the page, with a description of which model was used and how the output was reviewed. The bio-style "100,000+ unique combinations" template farms common on other sites are not the GuessGlobe model.
GuessGlobe is monetised by a single non-intrusive display ad served by Google AdSense and occasional affiliate links to atlases and travel books. Advertisers have no editorial input. We have never been paid, asked, or offered to mention any specific product, brand, country, or organisation in our articles, and we would refuse such an offer if it came. The full monetisation breakdown is on the About page.
If you think one of our articles is wrong, incomplete, biased, or unsourced, the fastest path is the Contact form. We read every message, and we publish a correction when one is warranted. Disagreement that does not amount to a factual error is logged for future revision but does not always lead to a change — being challenged is part of running an editorial product. Persistent abusive or bad-faith correspondence is, at our discretion, ignored.
Short version. Country list follows the UN. Borders follow Natural Earth. Capitals follow the country's own gazette first, then the UN, then the CIA Factbook as tiebreak. Articles are human-written and human-reviewed, AI is used only for editing and outlining, every fact is sourced, every correction is logged, and we are funded by one display ad and modest affiliate income — never by editorial sponsorship.