With addition of issuers a while ago we lost our country clubs, because of terms ambiguity. In my modest opinion, country clubs were enjoyed by many and served as a collecting goals for some.
I would like to open user pool on what you would like to see with current situation. Right now, number of issuers continue to grow and number of countries continues to fluctuate with catalogue changes.
A - we can do nothing. Country count will be still based on issuer being first level in the list. Number of issuers is still the same.
B - we can get rid of number of countries. Only issuers would be countedcounted
C - we can count only current UN members and permanent observers as Countries. Issuers count stay the same.
D - any other solution you can come up with (please specify)
Please vote in the comments. :)
Best regards,
Jarek
I vote A or D, just leave it as is or make slight modifications.
Issuers is a largely meaningless stat in my eyes, it's heavily biased toward 20th century notgeld and other commonly available local issues so the stat tends to be inflated by even a modest collection of these items.
UN member states is not meaningless, but is biased in ways obvious to everyone. If we used this, Palestine, which controls no territory and does not circulate its own money (they use NIS), would be a country, while Taiwan, which has considerable territory and international relations and does issue its own money, would not be. I'm not trying to be political, but this makes little sense from a neutral collecting perspective. It would also, I guess, exclude pre-modern political entities like the Roman Empire, Ottoman Empire, etc, which seem fairly important to me.
The primary change I would make to our country count is to collapse all the various British possessions and territories under United Kingdom, particularly those that issue only noncirculating coins.
I think, what Numista evolutionally came to is better. If you count only UN members, it won't decrease many questions, what about Vatican, Palestine, Taiwan? What about countries that existed in the past? What about ancient countries? Etc.
It can/will be messy historically (Issuers) but, it is a succinct starting point. I can learn about the history and current events of the World.
Case in point. As Outsider has mentioned, Palestine and Taiwan are grey areas. But, last I checked, Scotland and Wales are "Countries" within the United Kingdom. Also, my pet peeve of US Civil War Tokens and Hard Times Tokens not being listed as an Issuer under the USA is mind boggling to me!! (See Conder Tokens, French/German Notgelds, Canadian/Australian Colonials, etc.)
Come the end of the day I'll organize my collection the way I see fit and (I hope) mostly visit other sites to voice my opinion.
It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure, that just ain't so. Mark Twain
The world map for "My coins" is split in 'countries' then by issuers
it's a powerful mean of displaying your collection
Despite some errors (LORRAINE in FRANCE, etc.) The current split country/issuer is the most interesting choice. .
Quote: "Peter M. Graham"Also, my pet peeve of US Civil War Tokens and Hard Times Tokens not being listed as an Issuer under the USA is mind boggling to me!! (See Conder Tokens, French/German Notgelds, Canadian/Australian Colonials, etc.)
Preach it brother. HTT went from at least having their own header in the *Tokens* landfill under the Coins tab, to being strewn about the forgotten dump of Miscellaneous Tokens under Exonumia with no header at all. They have their own catalog numbers and books about them are still in publication!
There is something wrong with the option C, because, strictly speaking, the UN list is not a list of countries, but of issuers (take China as an example). Also this criterion would be appropriate only for people who collect contemporary coins.
B is also wrong, but for different reasons. In this scenario, the familiar list of contemporary countries would be drowned in a sea of obscure entities which are of interest only to niche collectors, heavily reducing the usability for the worldwide community of ordinary hobbyists.
Quote: "Jarcek"C - we can count only current UN members and permanent observers as Countries. Issuers count stay the same.
By option C, do you mean to redesign the country list so only UN members are first-level countries (basically meaning every historical issuer is a sub-issuer to at least one modern country); or do you mean that the country list will stay how it currently is, but only UN members will count towards the country count (for example: Livonia would be a first-level issuer that does not count as a country)?
Quote: "Jarcek"C - we can count only current UN members and permanent observers as Countries. Issuers count stay the same.
By option C, do you mean to redesign the country list so only UN members are first-level countries (basically meaning every historical issuer is a sub-issuer to at least one modern country); or do you mean that the country list will stay how it currently is, but only UN members will count towards the country count (for example: Livonia would be a first-level issuer that does not count as a country)?
Quote: "Sulfur"By option C, do you [...] mean that the country list will stay how it currently is, but only UN members will count towards the country count (for example: Livonia would be a first-level issuer that does not count as a country)?
This is how I understood it.
I have ubderstood is at it's only about what counts as what, and not a total remake of the entire country list.
It saddens me that C will probably win. Anything* but C. I vote for D but only because A is boring (there are other problems with the current setup that options B and C do not solve and/or make even worse).
Overall, I mostly agree with numinis: C is a choice for people who collect coins of modern countries (and even then the UN states list might not be the best option; where does that leave older places that don't neatly correspond to UN members? for that matter where does it leave those that do but don't really belong there - would Cilician Armenia be counted under Turkey?), while B, with everything all together, would be an unnavigable mess.
I did like how (for a while) the assorted notgeld types all counted as a single issuer (per overarching country), merely with many currencies - German Notgeld, French Notgeld, etcetera, each of them just one issuer. ("United States - Pre-Federal" is a remnant example of this setup.) In my banknotes collection I have 271 issuers, and like half of them are just notgeld, which makes it hard to understand how much I have in other areas.
One other very inconvenient side-effect of C: we would have just 193 country listings, maybe 194 at a stretch. (There are 193 UN member states and 2 permanent observers, but Micronesia has only ever issued exonumia**. Palestine has also only ever issued exonumia, but the city of Gaza would probably have to count under Palestine.)
So a 200 club would be impossible (less than 200 entries), and a 150 club too easy, leaving no convenient number to do a club for. At the current situation we can use 250 as challenging but doable.
Also, I do have to agree with Frenchlover: the current world map depicted on the "My coins" page simulates C anyway (aside from special entries for some of the most important exclaves). There is no need to enforce C at the counting level too; it would only complicate things further.
If I can put forward my own proposal: figure out the principles that the (first-level) country listings used immediately prior to the addition of issuers, and work it out based on that. This would mean about 450 countries, I think.
*) as I write this, I realize that chances are there would be an even worse proposal somehow, but out of the current options, I like C the least
**) Wikimedia Commons has several pictures of Philippine coins counterstamped in 1899 for circulation in Micronesia. I've never seen any other pictures of any of those types, and I'm not very confident that they were actually issued and are not modern forgeries - or indeed that they were issued for circulation and not as souvenirs.
Indeed, taking the issuer count BUT excluding a set of specific local issuers would get us closest to the old system and has the best feeling for "states".
Exclude: notgeld (Germany, France, ...) (or maybe count them as 1 "issuer")
At first view, but I'm not such a country-club expert, thsi wouldinclude all the separate German states, Italian States, Indian states, that we indeed do consider more as a country ...
Maybe include also only include issuers that had circulation coins or (older) tokens (eg. trade tokens fromColonial Australia, Canada ...) to avoid NCLT-only issuers
Just call me Bram
No new swaps for the moment, still too many half-ongoing swaps to clean up!
I would vote option D, which would specifically be a combination of both A and C: keep the counts we currently have, but add an additional one for UN Countries. There would have to be a some consideration of the naming of each count, but I do not see why anything would have to be eliminated all together.
So... one count for UN members (including observer states or whatever else people might like), one count for first-level issuers, and one count for total issuers.
"A" with an option to see a number of second level issuers.
Option "C" would allow only modern coins with plenty of countries where only NCLT options available... I guess it is much more interesting to hunt for a coin from Livonia then from some modern NCLT
My personal list of scammers from Numista: erniemix, yvain, CassTaylor
Quote: "Grinya""A" with an option to see a number of second level issuers.
Option "C" would allow only modern coins with plenty of countries where only NCLT options available... I guess it is much more interesting to hunt for a coin from Livonia then from some modern NCLT
I agree, knowing the number of 2nd level issuers would be neat, and they would be a fairly close proxy to a pre-reform "country".
As for the second part, I agree almost entirely, but IIRC for a few modern countries with "only NCLT options" there are also a few (usually very rare) circulating notgeld types, and/or older types issued in the same area (e.g. the City of Gaza coins for Palestine); others (an intersecting subset) might be able to be included depending on the handling of (e.g.) East Caribbean States or Central African States coinage.
I'll probably have to go through the list to see which countries can't be represented outside NCLT even in those ways; I know Micronesia is one (in fact it can't be represented outside exonumia), but I'm not sure if there are others.
Of course allowing a modern CFA franc coin to count as half a dozen countries at once might also be somewhat cheating...
I think the 300 Country Club didnt die. It only were changed to a similar Issuers Club.
The old 300 Country Club could be change to an XXXX Issuer Club. This is much more chalenge to collect issuers than "countries". Of course some countries are very difficult to find. But having many issuers is very diffult too. A very big chalenge.
I dont care about numbers, but follow the Numista is very, very interesting, in order to having a very diverse collection with coins from many places and historical periods.
As Numista is organized, the "countries" only make sense at the organizational level, since in the entities that there is only one country level, I understand that it also adds an issuer, so I think that what really counts are the issuers (countries, regions, cities, etc...) that have issued their own currency.
That being said, my logical vote would be for option B (I don't see the logic in having two values that duplicate each other, such as countries and issuers), but since I think this could be something "traumatic" since it represents an excessively important change, I think that the option I would opt for would be A, since counting countries, I do not see any logic in eliminating from this sum Monetary Unions (modern and old), old countries and disappeared zones and non-independent entities (Bermuda, Gibraltar, French Polynesia, etc...) that with option C would be left out of this sum.
Coin referee for: Andorra, Equatorial Guinea, Marshall Islands, Moldova, Liberia and Spain
Banknote referee for: Andorra, Equatorial Guinea and Spain
It's interesting to note that the same question rose up for a welknown stamp's collector website.
the website manager took the option B. In the stamps category, the term "country" is loosely used and this list refers to any separate area or region that has issued stamps in the past, present or future.
There are currently more than 1000 stamp countries ...
Hello, relatively new here. I've read almost the entire 2017 world coin set of posts, and that inspired me to start my world coin collection.
I would vote for B (with some exclusions). I would never have learned about upper and lower canada and newfoundland (I now have those in my collection) if the count only included countries and not issuers. I enjoyed learning about German East Africa and then collecting the coin. Excluding all those interesting issuers from the count would be a shame, and leave out some fun and interesting history and coins.
I keep my own count on a piece of paper in my coin box, regardless of what gets posted on here, but it would be nice if it were close. :)
206 countries, being 193 UN member states, 2 UN non-member observer states, and 11 other states.
We would actually have here 202 countries, as Kosovo, Northern Cyprus and Micronesia have never issued coins, nor the British Palestine coins count as the current Palestine non-member observer state.
I think it would be very cool to have the New 202 Country Club, where the members can say they have coins from every country of the world. I would be a member already! 🥰
206 countries, being 193 UN member states, 2 UN non-member observer states, and 11 other states.
We would actually have here 202 countries, as Kosovo, Northern Cyprus and Micronesia have never issued coins, nor the British Palestine coins count as the current Palestine non-member observer state.
I think it would be very cool to have the New 202 Country Club, where the members can say they have coins from every country of the world. I would be a member already! 🥰
Coins from the city of Gaza, as well as provincial issues from Gaza, Neapolis, and Sebaste, and maybe a few others, would have to count under Palestine, I think.
I'll have to look on some maps to figure out if Northern Cyprus gets any old issuers as well. (Probably, but I can't name any particular plausible options offhand.) [EDIT: Salamis and Lapethos, at least.]
IIRC I checked at some point and Kosovo doesn't actually have any former coin issuers on its territory.
EDIT 2: turns out the territory of the District of Branković mostly consists of modern Kosovo (it also includes parts of modern Serbia, Bosnia, North Macedonia, and Montenegro, but the capitals were in Kosovo). This auction listing explicitly gives the mint as “Kosovo” and the title as “Vojvoda of Kosovo”; other sources suggest Pristina and Prizren (both in Kosovo) as plausible mint locations.
FrenchloverIt's interesting to note that the same question rose up for a welknown stamp's collector website. the website manager took the option B. In the stamps category, the term "country" is loosely used and this list refers to any separate area or region that has issued stamps in the past, present or future. There are currently more than 1000 stamp countries ...
