I do a lot of travelling, and as time goes on I will build up information in the "Countries" part of the library on various countries around the world.

To kick start this section off I guess we need a list of countries around the world. So how many countries exactly are there in the world? This is actually by no means an easy question to answer because it can be very hard to define a country. Some countries are clearly countries, like Australia, the United States or Thailand.

But what about places like Hong Kong, since 1998 known as a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. What about Vatican City, which is only granted "Special Observer" status at the United Nations and to all intents and purposes is part of Italy?