One of our most popular pages is the Text List of All Countries in the World. Strangely this little piece of data has gotten over 60k hits since we posted it and has received a wide range of very positive reactions from around the world. What started as just something that annoyed me personally (how to get an updated list of all of the World's countries in on easy to copy/paste location) proved to be something that a lot of other people were looking for too.

Now, when I first did this I didn't expect that generating a list of countries was going to be quite so controversial. Apparently, lots of folks were concerned that my list didn't contain a country that they wanted to see. Now, I didn't have a lot of time to moderate this so just settled on Wikipedia's list of countries as the final value. This I think satisfied many people.

This data should be readily provided by the UN in a machine readable fashion. There is no reason why this data (and even lists of countries that are being considered) shouldn't be made available. Countries change their boundaries & names regularly enough that there are a great many data sources that regularly need to be updated. Why not make it easy?