436828 - Firefox is used in more than 230 countries. Really?

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(www.mozilla.org :: General, defect)

Description

[Kohei Yoshino [:kohei]]

Based on what? There are not so many countries on the planet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_member_states

Comment 1

[Reed Loden [:reed]]

lol, good catch.

http://geography.about.com/cs/countries/a/numbercountries.htm says "the best answer is that there are 195 countries in the world."

Comment 3

[Justin Anthony Knapp]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries

"Countries" ~= "states"

Comment 4

[Craig Cockburn]

You've also got the issue of Scotland, England etc which are countries but not independent states (at least not yet, give it a few years).

Comment 5

[Dotan Cohen]

The estimate may be by language translations, some countries which have more than one.

Comment 6

[Paul Kim]

As noted by comment #3, we opted for most expansive interpretation of number of countries. Resolving as invalid.

Comment 7

[Majken Connor [:Kensie]]

This is a fine point of language usage and I think we can expect more people to react the same way as the reporter and not take the time to find out what was meant. Most people are taught in school that there are fewer than 200 Countries.  People who take the time to look that up are going to be likely to find results that back that up, like OP and reed.

From the wikipedia article:

"Such inclusion criteria means the list does not treat the word "country" as synonymous with "sovereign state," as one may often find in colloquial usage. Note, that in certain circumstances and in certain languages the term country is understood in the most restrictive sense, thus including only the 193 entities mentioned under the first item below."

IMO that is enough reason to use wording that better reflects what is actually included in that number (or to have a footnote referencing the wikipedia article as the criteria).

Comment 8

[Jean-François Poirier]

From this list: http://id3lib.sourceforge.net/id3/iso639-2.html
After searching google for iso-639-2 country
I count 427...

Comment 9

[Majken Connor [:Kensie]]

That list is languages, it says so at the top.