I've just gone through and attempted to clean up the list of Countries in these
ways:

- countries that are not fully independent are typed
/location/administrative_division and /location/administrative_division/country
is set correctly - countries that don't exist any more have at least a
/location/dated_location/date_dissolved - the type /location/country isn't used on things that aren't countries (as it
was on a few cities, some geographical regions, the fictional military force
"Unified Sacred Band", the ethnicity "White American" and the occupation
"Theatrical Producer") - various typo-created topics with no connections flagged for deletion, or ones
with actual info flagged for merging

Thus it is now, or will be after all that flagged stuff is processed, possible
to get a nearly-correct list of real countries via this MQL:

[{ "id": null, "name": null, "type": "/location/country", "/location/administrative_division/country":
{"*":null,"optional":"forbidden"}, "/location/dated_location/date_dissolved":{"*":null,"optional":"forbidden"}, "form_of_government":{"name":"Government in exile","optional":"forbidden"}, "limit":300, "sort":"name" }]​

Some notes:

- The European Union is currently typed as Country. This isn't right, but it's
being used to assign it a currency, which seems useful. I left it alone. But
there should probably be some other way of modeling the idea of a transnational
currency.

- I couldn't figure out what the deal is with Luxembourg. It's not typed
/location/administrative_division, as far as I can see in the UI, but a MQL
query that filters out things with /location/administrative_division/country
filters it out. Is MQL seeing deleted properties the UI doesn't show?

- Mali was designated as an administrative region of Guinea, for reasons I could
not determine. Obscure vandalism? I removed this.

- Federated States of Micronesia was designated as an administrative region of
the US. I removed this, and the location/contained_by references to the US. But
this didn't make it show up in the above query. Maybe the same issue as
Luxembourg? The UI and MQL looking at deleted types/properties differently?
Ditto Palau, as well.

- After some research I removed the /location/country type from Macedonia, which
refers to the geographic region. Republic of Macedonia is the country.

- Is there some way to represent the succession of nations? The Republic of
Upper Volta was renamed Burkina Faso in 1984. There are two different topics,
and I marked the former one's date_dissolved, but I didn't see any way to code
that it was replaced by the latter.

- I have removed the assertion that the United Kingdom was dissolved in 1922.

- Maybe there should be some type or property for designating official current
countries? Seems like a list of the countries of the world should be one of the
definitively simple things to get out of Freebase, and the above MQL is not
"definitively simple".

Anyway, hopefully that was helpful.

glenn