Artifact CommonsWhen Country Identifiers Changed
A timeline for matching archival records to withdrawn names and identifier systems.
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What it shows
- 31: withdrawn-name records
- 18: records with year-only precision
- 30: distinct former alpha-2 codes
Historical alpha-2 codes can repeat. The four-letter withdrawal identifier distinguishes records that a two-letter join would merge.
Method
All source rows. Orange points have year-only dates; teal points have full dates. Withdrawal dates are identifier-maintenance dates and can differ from political events.
Sources and reuse
iso-codes ISO 3166-3 snapshot. LGPL-2.1-or-later.
Source retrieval: 2026-09-08 UTC. This is a fixed edition. Observation dates and coverage differ by source.
Inspect the immutable input snapshot for provenance and source terms. The complete bundle includes license notices and source metadata. Arcomm permits reuse and adaptation of its layouts and explanatory text with attribution. Upstream terms apply to source-derived content.