A data site is only as good as its upkeep, and upkeep should be visible. This page records the changes made to the site itself and the date each statistic was last read from its publisher, so that nothing here has to be taken on trust.
Import dates are recorded in the dataset files by the importer, not read from the file system, so a fresh checkout does not make everything look new.
Changes to the site
The larger changes, newest first, written for a reader rather than copied from a change log. A change that affects what you may do with the site — a licence, a term — is always listed here.
Who builds the site, named
The footer of every page and the About page now say who designs, builds and maintains Nations Inquiry: Deploy Byte, a web development agency. If you would like a site like this one, the footer links to the agency's own enquiry form; this site's contact form stays for the site. The credit is plain links that load nothing and collect nothing, so the privacy policy is unchanged.
A new Analysis section, and less repeated text on the data pages
There is a new section, Analysis, for written pieces drawn from this site's own data. The first four are published: what the 2026 Country Index shows, why 41 countries could not be ranked, the countries whose standing on one subject sits furthest from their overall place, and the 26 places in the index that two or three countries share. Each piece is dated the day its figures were read, names the pages it rests on, and is read and signed off by the editor before it appears. At the same time the explanations that were repeated on every country-and-subject page and every dataset edition page — how a standing is worked out, what a derived position means, which end of a statistic is better — are now said once, on the topic page and the methodology page, and linked from the rest. Every figure, table and page stays where it was. Finally, www.nationsinquiry.com now sends you to nationsinquiry.com, so every page has one address.
Our reader count had a robot in it. A scraper that opens pages in a real browser was being counted by Google Analytics as hundreds of new readers an hour, each reading one page and leaving, which made the count say more about the scraper than about you. Pages now check, in your own browser, whether the browser is being driven by automation software or matches a scraper we have seen, and if so they do not load Google's counting script at all. Nothing else changes: every page works the same for everyone, robots included, and the check's answer is not stored or sent anywhere. We updated the privacy policy first to say so.
Most pages now have a Share button under their headline. On a phone it opens your phone's own share menu; on a computer it offers WhatsApp, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, email or a copy of the link. Each choice is an ordinary link to that service's own sharing page: nothing from Facebook, X or anyone else is loaded into our pages, so none of them can see you reading here. A shared link is always the page's own address, with nothing added to track it. We also drew a preview picture for every page that lacked one, so a link pasted into a chat or a post now shows what it leads to: the six section front pages, a wide card for each chart in place of a cropped poster, and a site card for everything else. We updated the privacy policy first, to say that Google Analytics counts which page was shared and which way, and nothing more.
There is now a daily quiz, the Nations Daily Quiz: ten rounds a day, each with four countries to choose from. Most rounds ask about a published statistic — which country has the most people, the cleanest air, the longest lives — and one each asks you to name a flag, a capital, a country marked by a dot on a map, and a country from three of its own numbers. Every answer shows the values, the year they describe and the organisation that published them, with a link to the statistic or the country. Everyone plays the same puzzle, and a new one starts at 00:00 UTC; afterwards you can keep playing practice rounds. The quiz never rates a government, never asks about deaths, draws no borders and asks nothing about places whose status is disputed. Your answers and your streak are kept in your own browser and nowhere else. We updated the privacy policy first to say so, and to say that Google Analytics counts when a puzzle is finished or shared, with nothing but the puzzle's number.
Advertising is coming, and the privacy policy says so first
This site is free to read, and we would like it to stay that way, so we have applied to Google AdSense to show advertisements on some pages. No ad appears yet: Google reviews a site before approving it, and we will not switch ads on until readers in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland can be asked for consent first. We rewrote the privacy policy before adding any ad code, as it promises. It now explains what Google's advertising collects, which cookies it sets and how to decline personalised ads, in one place. The terms of use and the About page now say where ads may go and where they never will: never inside a table, a map or a ranking. Advertisers get no say in which statistics are published, how a ranking is built or where any country stands.
A feedback button on every page, and the forms now arrive
Every page now carries a small Feedback tab — on the right edge of a wide screen, in the bottom corner of a phone. It opens a short form over the page you are reading, so you do not lose your place: a rating from 1 to 5, whether you found what you came for, which parts of the site need work, and room to say more. A rating and your email address are the only required answers. We are also correcting something we should have noticed sooner: until today the contact form and the newsletter signup never delivered anything. They checked what you typed and then asked you to email us instead. All three forms now reach our inbox, sent from our own server to our own mailbox with no form service in between. If you wrote to us through the old form and gave up, please try again. The privacy policy has been updated to say exactly what each form sends.
Until today this site measured nothing: it had no idea how many people read a page, or which pages were read at all. That is a pleasant thing to be able to say and an unhelpful way to decide what to work on next, so the site now uses Google Analytics to count visits to each page. It records the page you are on, what sent you there, and the sort of browser and device you are using, and it works out an approximate location from your connection without keeping the address itself. It does not identify you, no advertising feature is switched on, and nothing here is sold or advertised. Counting requires two cookies, which is two more than this site used to set, so the privacy policy was rewritten before the change went live: it now names both cookies, says what each one holds, and points to the three ways of switching the counting off — a browser add-on from Google, an ordinary content blocker, or simply clearing the cookies. Every page works identically if you do.
Every chart on this site is a picture of somebody else's published ranking, and until today the numbers in those pictures existed only as pixels — unreadable by a search engine, by an assistant answering a question, by a screen reader, and by this site's own search box. All twelve charts now carry the rows their picture shows as a real table underneath it: the rank, the flag, the country (linked to its profile) and the value, exactly as the publisher printed them. Four of the twelve articles previously had no text at all. Each chart also says which kind of body published its figures — a statistical agency, an index producer, a commercial service or a magazine's compilation — what this site holds on the same subject, and, where it holds nothing, that it holds nothing.
The search box in the header used to look through the twelve chart articles and nothing else, so a reader who typed a country name was told there was nothing here. It now searches everything the site publishes: every country, every statistic, every subject, every region, every article and every page about the site. Typing offers matches as you go, grouped by what kind of thing each one is, and the results page shows all of them with a filter for each kind. Accents are optional and the names people actually use work — “Turkey” finds Türkiye, “cote” finds Côte d’Ivoire, and a publisher’s abbreviation such as HDI or CPI finds its index.
Eleven pages now explain the site itself: what it is, how a number gets onto it, who publishes the data, what the words mean, what has changed, what has been corrected, how to cite it, how to reach us, and the terms, privacy and accessibility statements. The About page was rewritten and the privacy policy replaced, since the old one still described a WordPress site. The site also gained a proper page for addresses that do not exist, a robots file for crawlers, and an RSS feed of the articles.
Every continent and UN sub-region now has a page of its own with a drawn locator map, a card for each member country, ladders showing how spread out its members are on each topic, and a written introduction. A region's place among its peers is the median of its members' positions, printed with its field, and never a rank.
The twelve topic pages gained drawn plates, a podium, a card for each key statistic, a world map per topic and the full standings. Each country's page on each topic opens with the country's own photograph, shows its key values as strips, its trends, a zoomed map with its neighbours, and a band across all twelve topics.
The articles, the pages and the homepage's featured picks were moved into the site's own files, and the WordPress installation that had served them was retired. Nothing changed for readers except that pages now build from one place, with no database and no third party in the way.
Country pages rebuilt, with photographs
Each country's page now opens with a photograph of a place in that country, sourced from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence and credited beside it, followed by its key numbers, its rank histories and every statistic held for it, grouped by topic. Borders on the maps are drawn as administered on the ground, from Natural Earth.
The homepage now leads with the question the site is built to answer — where does your country stand — with a country of the day, the continents, a world map, the records, the biggest rank movements and the most recent imports. On the same day the last three topics that had only two key statistics each gained a third, so every topic now votes on at least three independent measures.
The ranking was rebuilt on a new method. A small set of key statistics now votes, one topic at a time, instead of every statistic on the site; each country's value becomes a place within its own statistic's field before anything is averaged; and the result is published as a position with its field, never as a score. Version 1, which averaged everything and printed a number out of 100, is withdrawn and its positions are not comparable with these.
A large batch of education, gender, inequality and labour statistics joined the site, taking it past 130 indicators. Three of the World Bank's poverty and inequality series were re-read from the Bank's own poverty platform, which publishes them to more decimal places than the general data API does.
All seventy-nine statistics then on the site were compared, row by row, against their producers' own releases to find any that had been rounded on the way through a redistributor. Two had been: under-five mortality and the World Bank's poverty and inequality series. Both are now read from their producers, and the check is a required step before any statistic is added.
A rule was adopted for every import: store what the publisher published, digit for digit. Rounding at import had collapsed distinct countries onto the same value in two indices and manufactured ties that decide ranks. Precision is now trimmed only when a number is drawn on screen. The same week, a statistic whose publisher ranks nobody was allowed to opt in to a position derived by ordering its values, and every such position is labelled as derived.
Thirteen indices whose publishers do not permit commercial reuse were removed from the site, with their pages and data. From this date a statistic is published only when its publisher's own terms allow it, and the licence is named on every dataset page with the date it was checked.
The five continents and twenty-two UN sub-regions became pages that rank their members, and every country gained a page for each topic it is measured on.
Every statistic was grouped under one of twelve subjects, each with a page ranking countries on it, and every country gained a profile listing all the statistics held for it. The ranking moved to its present address, /country-index.
The site's first composite ranking was published, built from the handful of indices then imported. It was replaced by method version 2 on 11 September 2026.
The numbers behind the charts became sortable tables, one per edition, each naming its publisher and the year its figures describe. It was the start of the site as a data site rather than a set of articles.
Every statistic on the site, ordered by the date its current edition was read from its publisher. “Imported” means fetched and stored, which is not the same as “the publisher released something new”: a re-import that changed nothing still moves a statistic up this list, and that is honest, because the numbers were re-read that day.
The most recently imported statistics, newest first
The articles have a feed at /feed.xml, which any feed reader, and most email clients, can subscribe to. Mistakes and their fixes are recorded separately, on the Corrections page, because a correction deserves its own record rather than a line among the improvements.