Some places on this site are claimed by more than one state. Here is what we publish about them, and what we refuse to publish.
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Some places on this site are contested. We do not decide who is right.
Each such place carries the status "disputed" and a short neutral note, and the data follows GeoNames, our upstream source, without endorsing any claim. The note is reproduced from the record word for word wherever the place appears, and it is never paraphrased into something softer or sharper. The list at the foot of this page is generated from the live data rather than typed out here, so what you read there is what the site holds at the moment you read it, and nothing else.
The page still answers the question. A contested place has a capital on this site if its record has one, because refusing to answer is also a position.
Alongside that:
The note appears above the answer, before anything else on the page.
The roles are the ordinary ones used everywhere else. There is no "proclaimed" role and no "claimed" role, so a claimed capital is shown as the official one and the note says whose claim it is.
No phrasing on the page describes a contested place as a country, state or territory "of" anywhere. That rule is applied by the code that writes the sentences, not by an editor remembering, so it holds on the page heading, the search result, the meta description and the structured data alike.
The note travels with the relation. If a contested city is the capital of somewhere, the note appears on that other place's page too, so it is never possible to read the answer without reading the caveat.
These four are asked about more than any others, so the rule is worked through on each of them here. They are worked examples, not the list: the list is generated at the foot of this page from the records themselves, and on a copy of the site whose dataset holds none of these, it will say so.
Israel is shown with Jerusalem as its capital, carrying the Jerusalem note.
The State of Palestine is shown with East Jerusalem as the capital it proclaims, carrying the same Jerusalem note, and with Ramallah as its seat of government. Wikidata records Ramallah as a de facto capital; the site shows it in the seat of government role.
Western Sahara is shown with Laayoune as its capital, carrying the Western Sahara note. Laayoune itself is not marked disputed. The territory is.
Tokelau is shown with no capital at all, because its seat rotates between its three atolls. A place is left without a capital only for a reason recorded in the pipeline, and every reason used appears in the run report.
A place is marked disputed when two or more states claim it, or when a widely recognised international body treats its status as unresolved.
Being contested does not remove a place from the site. Its page still answers what its capital is, and it is still reachable from its parent. Being named on this page does not put a place on the list either: only a record in the data carries the status and the note.
Use the contact page and cite a source. That includes thinking a place is wrongly marked, that a contested place is missing, that the capital shown for one is wrong, or that a note is worded in a way that takes a side.
Changes go through the same review as every other data change. The note and the underlying record are edited together, so the site cannot end up saying one thing in the data and another on the page.
Read from the records, not typed here. Each entry carries the note the record holds, word for word.
No place in the dataset carries this status at the moment. The list appears here as soon as one does.