Educational purpose and editorial policy
PyWorldAtlas is a purely educational package that provides offline access to factual geographic data. It is intended for learners, teachers, developers, researchers, and anyone who needs a compact geographic reference without a network connection.
The project does not provide political commentary, promote a viewpoint, make qualitative judgments about people or places, or decide geographic disagreements. Its role is limited to presenting clearly defined data from documented sources. Numeric ranking utilities only sort explicitly labelled facts or transparent calculations; they are not measures of human or cultural worth.
Editorial commitments
- Education first
Every public field has a clear learning or reference purpose.
- Factual scope
Values come from identified sources or transparent calculations over sourced values.
- Careful attribution
A value represents the convention used by its cited source. Including it is not an endorsement of an organization or a broader interpretation.
- Respectful language
Documentation and examples describe every person, place, language, and culture with care.
- Honest limitations
Missing, conflicting, changing, or unavailable data stays missing or is explained clearly.
- Reproducibility
Source versions, checksums, review decisions, and known limitations are retained so the data can be inspected.
How sources are selected
Sources are selected for a specific field, not for a general point of view. The project prefers established standards bodies, international statistical and naming publications, openly licensed geographic datasets, and primary institutional records when appropriate.
No source is presented as universally neutral or complete. Names, boundaries, and statistics can vary between institutions or change over time. PyWorldAtlas handles this through attribution, narrow field definitions, independent cross-checks where useful, and published limitations. Commentary, anonymous compilations, unsupported claims, and advocacy material are not used as authorities for the bundled dataset.
Names, areas, and borders
The words country and area are practical dataset labels. They are not statements about recognition or status. Names, classifications, and land-border relationships follow documented source snapshots and review rules.
Other institutions may use different conventions. PyWorldAtlas records its chosen convention so results are reproducible; it does not ask users to adopt that convention outside the package. See Land borders and paths, Data sources and freshness, and Data quality and limitations for exact coverage and limitations.
Publication boundaries
The package focuses on stable geographic reference fields: identifiers, names, languages, writing systems, capitals, populated places, coordinates, distances, regions, currencies, calling codes, internet domains, and reviewed geographic relationships. Source-aware anthem titles, mottos, demonyms, timezones, and postal formats may be included when their exact field boundary and coverage are documented.
Current affairs, political opinion, disputed interpretation, comparisons of human worth, and speculative narrative are outside the dataset. Future fields must have a precise educational use, suitable reuse terms, dependable sources, and a documented review method.
Using the package in education
PyWorldAtlas is designed for classrooms, tutorials, portfolios, research prototypes, and general-purpose software. Applications should preserve source and coverage notes for fields that can vary between institutions. Teaching source literacy is encouraged: a sourced value can be useful without being the only convention in use.
Learning helpers are intentionally small and inspectable. Seeded samples, flashcards, and multiple-choice questions are deterministic for a fixed dataset version. They do not create accounts, retain learner answers, calculate grades, or send activity outside the local Python process. Teachers remain in control of interpretation, pacing, and assessment.
Community and corrections
Factual corrections are welcome when they identify the affected field and record, proposed value, dependable source, source date, and reason for the change. Respect is required throughout the project. Hateful, harassing, threatening, demeaning, or discriminatory content is not accepted.
Version 0.5.0
Version 0.5.0 establishes and audits this educational scope. It adds no political commentary or opinion dataset. The release gate checks public fields, source roles, documentation, examples, contribution guidance, correction procedures, and release contents against this policy.