The Map of Freedom reflects the findings of Freedom House's 2006 survey Freedom in the World (PDF)archive copy at the Wayback Machine. Freedom in the World is an annual institutional effort that monitors the gains and losses for political rights and civil liberties in 192 nations and 18 related and disputed territories. For each country, the survey provides a concise report on political and human rights developments, along with ratings of political rights and civil liberties. Based on these ratings, countries are divided into three categories: Free (green), Partly Free (orange), and Not Free (red), as reflected in the Map of Freedom.
The WIKIMEDIA COMMONS Atlas of the World is an organized and commented collection of geographical, political and historical maps available at Wikimedia Commons. The main page is therefore the portal to maps and cartography on Wikimedia. That page contains links to entries by country, continent and by topic as well as general notes and references.
Every entry has an introduction section in English. If other languages are native and/or official in an entity, introductions in other languages are added in separate sections. The text of the introduction(s) is based on the content of the Wikipedia encyclopedia. For sources of the introduction see therefore the Wikipedia entries linked to. The same goes for the texts in the history sections.
Historical maps are included in the continent, country and dependency entries.
The status of various entities is disputed. See the content for the entities concerned.
The maps of former countries that are more or less continued by a present-day country or had a territory included in only one or two countries are included in the atlas of the present-day country. For example the Ottoman Empire can be found in the Atlas of Turkey.