A large number of pages contain lists of nations that include (or could benefit from) a triple reference for each country:
- a visual reference, i.e. a thumb of the country's flag.
- a lexical reference, i.e. the country's name
- a hyperlink reference to the article of the country in question.
A series of templates was created to ease the inclusion of these triple references. The obvious choice for the names of such templates have been the country codes by which each nation is commonly identified with.
However there exist two problems:
- a number of such country codes exist, including the ISO 3166-1 codes, the IOC country codes, and the FIFA country codes. They are not always compatible and consistent with each other, and are often counterintuitive.
- Some countries are also often commonly referred to by more than one name.
The following list strives for both inclusivity and clarity. Please try not to use or create template names like SLO or MAL which may mislead people into applying them for a number of different countries.
See also Template:flagIOC for Olympic articles.
Several countries have multiple country codes. In most of these cases, the ISO country code is used for the template, with redirects from the other country codes. For example Template:DEU is the template for Germany, but Template:GER (code used by FIFA and the IOC) redirects to DEU.
