NationMaster is based on such a great idea. The premise of having gratis one source that would allow quick comparison of countries has merit. Many assignments ask students to do just that. Headlines from both the popular and scholarly press lament young people’s lack of geographic literacy with good reason. Too few students could begin to take a world outline map and fill in the country names, much less demonstrate any knowledge of the background, physical features, ethnic populations, religions or health care access. A first perusal of NationMaster was exciting. It is possible to compare countries, get profiles of individual countries or categories such as agriculture, crime, social issues, education and many more. The devil is in the details, though, and with closer scrutiny, it is disappointing. Too often the information and statistics are out of date in a time when changes are unfolding at a dizzying pace. In addition, it is difficult to discern where the exact data comes from, making it difficult to look for newer statistics from the issuing agency. Two requests for further source information and updating frequency went unanswered.
Using the example of the United Kingdom, the population data are from 2014, the GDP from 2012, the groups it belongs to include Christian Countries, Cold Countries and Heavily Indebted Countries, among others. It is confusingly listed as ranked first and last for Geography – Area and David Cameron is listed as Prime Minister. The agricultural statistics were taken from 2001 Food and Agricultural Organisation data, as well as data from 2003, 2005, 2007, 2004. The most current statistic was from 2010. Weather statistics are from 2009. Confusingly, linking to the terrorism in the UK opens the door to many terrorist incidents, with the number of British nationals killed, which made sense in a fashion but what seemed logical was to find the number of incidents in the UK instead.
The comparing two countries option is easy. Choosing Canada and Australia, the user sees a side-by-side comparison with cost of living, crime rates, GDPs, health and people compared. Clicking on the label for the topic gets a ranked listing of the countries – for example, clicking on the murder rate label, an alphabetical list of the countries and their murder rates pop up. Some items articulate some differences, such as, in the example of Canada and the USA, one is “slightly larger” and the other “slightly smaller” than the USA. Below the side-by-side comparison chart is a source list. The most recent statistic is from 2009.
For Australians, there is a very fun and useful feature. Users can find affordability, safety, convenience a “hip score” of neighbourhoods in various cities around the country.
There are so many issues, from indifferent punctuation and capitalisation to inane factoids such as “Poland is full of history”. The problems with NationMaster detract from the possible value of this website.
