What this site is, what it counts as a capital, and who is answerable for it.
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All The Capitals answers one question for every place that has an answer: what is the capital, and how do we know? Not just the 195 or so countries. Every administrative division those countries are made of, down to four levels: states, provinces, counties, districts, local government areas, and the city that is the seat of each.
Most reference sites stop at the national level, and the ones that go deeper usually stop at a table. A table cannot tell you that Bolivia has two answers, that Abuja is a city inside a territory that is not itself a capital, or that the seat of Lagos State is not Lagos. Those are the interesting cases, and they are the reason this exists.
The seat of a government, recorded with the role it plays. A country can have more than one, and at least ten do. South Africa has three. Bolivia, the Netherlands, Malaysia, Eswatini, Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Tanzania, Chile and Sri Lanka split the job between two. "At least" is deliberate: Burundi, Montenegro and Honduras each have a second seat that is real in practice or in ceremony, and whether to count them is a judgement rather than a fact, so the dataset records the roles and leaves the total alone.
So every capital on this site carries a role rather than a rank: official, seat of government, legislative, judicial, de facto, or historical. A page shows all of them. Where a capital has moved, the page says when, and the city it moved from keeps its own record of having been one.
Capitals also change. Burundi moved to Gitega in 2019. Indonesia's move to Nusantara is still under way. Egypt's New Administrative Capital is partly in use. Every entry carries the date it was last checked, so you can see how fresh the answer is rather than guess.
Some places are claimed by more than one state, and a reference site has to decide what to do about that. This one publishes the record its sources hold, marks the place as disputed, and puts a neutral note above the answer saying who claims what. It does not take a side and it never describes a contested place as belonging to anyone. The full policy, and the complete list of places it applies to, is on the disputed territories page.
A pipeline loads the place tree from GeoNames, cross-checks every capital against Wikidata, records every conflict it finds, and refuses to publish a run where too many disagree. Boundaries come from Natural Earth and geoBoundaries. Photographs come from Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, and only under licences that let us crop and republish them with credit.
Nothing is written by hand into the database except corrections, and every correction is recorded with who made it and why. How we know sets out the whole chain, and attribution lists every source with its licence.
All The Capitals is built and run by Joshua, working alone. The code, the pipeline and the design are one person's work, which is worth knowing when you read an answer: there is a single place to send a correction and a single person who will read it.
If something here is wrong, the contact page is the fastest way to say so. Corrections with a source attached get fixed quickest, because they can be checked without the research being done twice.
Nothing to read. The dataset will be published as a free nightly download under CC BY 4.0, because a reference site that hoards its own reference data is not much of one. There is no paywall, no sign-up wall, and no third-party advertising or tracking script anywhere on the site.