# UN Member States — Admission Table

**Topic:** United Nations member states and their date of admission
**Lane:** Extract — data extraction and tables
**Artifact:** `un_member_states.csv` (primary), `un_member_states.json` (machine-readable)

## Source

- Wikipedia — "List of member states of the United Nations"
  `https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_member_states_of_the_United_Nations`
- Extracted from the live page via `web_extract` (real fetch, no stale cache):
  `https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_member_states_of_the_United_Nations`
  → cached raw page: `/root/.hermes/profiles/ledger/cache/web/en.wikipedia.org-00a059c52c.md`
- Parser: `/root/.hermes/wizard-outputs/ledger/extract_un_member_states.py`
- Verification (exit-code verdict): `/root/.hermes/wizard-outputs/ledger/check_ledger.py`

## Schema

| Column            | Meaning                                        |
|-------------------|------------------------------------------------|
| `country`         | UN member state (official name as listed)      |
| `date_of_admission` | Date of admission (e.g. `24 October 1945`)   |
| `year`            | Calendar year of admission                     |
| `is_founding_member` | `true` when the state was admitted in 1945 (the 51 original members of the UN) |

## Provenance & counts

- Member states: **193** (per the page's summary line: "193 United Nations member states")
- Founding members (admitted 1945): **49** — the 51 original members of the UN, minus
  the 2 that were dissolved without a UN successor (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia; members
  ended 1992) plus the Republic of China's seat, which continues in the table as "China"
  (People's Republic of China, admitted 1945). 51 − 2 = 49 ✓.
- Admission years range: **1945** (earliest) to **2011** (South Sudan, latest).

## Notes

- Notes column from the source table was intentionally dropped: it is prose with
  variable length and embedded markup; only the two stable columns
  (`country`, `date_of_admission`) are material to this table extract.
- Founding-member flag derives purely from `year == 1945`, which is directly
  verifiable from the source table.