How this catalogue is built

Scope

• Include: every coin denomination ever struck for daily circulation by the country's monetary authority, across every year of issue.
• Exclude: collector coins (precious metals, low mintage, sold above face value), non-circulating commemoratives, and bullion series.
• Include but flag: circulating commemoratives that replace standard coins for a year (e.g. Armenia's Marzes series 2012). These belong in the page but should be marked in Notes; a future version of this standard will give them their own treatment.
• Time bound: from the country's current monetary authority's first issue to the present. Earlier currencies (pre-independence, replaced monetary systems) are out of scope unless explicitly requested.

Why banknotes and coins are catalogued differently

The split is shaped by how the two physical forms of money actually work, not by an editorial choice.

Time depth. Banknotes go back about 250 to 300 years; the earliest sustained issues are 17th-century Sweden and the Bank of England. Coins go back five millennia, to Lydia in the 7th century BC. A banknote catalogue is current-circulation; a coin catalogue has to also serve antiquity, classical, medieval and modern eras.

Where dead states fit. Yugoslavia (1918–2002), the USSR, Czechoslovakia, the Roman Empire all have coins worth cataloguing; none have banknotes in active circulation today. The coin catalogue accepts them as first-class entries; the banknote catalogue has no place for them without breaking the "money you might carry" purpose.

Multi-country banknotes are common. The Euro is shared by 20 EU states. The CFA franc serves 14 African states under two regional issuers. The East Caribbean dollar circulates in 8 island states. The US dollar is legal tender across multiple Pacific territories. A by-country banknote catalogue would either duplicate the Euro entry 20 times or quarantine it as an ownerless page.

Multi-country coins are rare. Even when countries share a currency, the coin reverses are national. Inside the Eurozone the obverse is shared but every member mints its own reverse: a Greek owl, an Italian Vitruvian man, a German eagle. The CFA franc splits its coin issues into western and central regional series. By-country works for coins precisely because countries do choose their own coin designs even inside a currency union.

The reader's question differs. With a banknote in hand the natural question is "what currency is this, and what is on it?". That question maps to a currency entry. With a coin in hand it is "what country issued this, and when?", which maps to a country entry. Each catalogue answers the question in the form it is actually asked.

Where the two meet. Issuing central banks (the National Bank of Georgia, the European Central Bank, the Magyar Nemzeti Bank, and the rest) appear in both directions; they are the people who decide what goes on the money. Each bank has its own page reached from both catalogues, so the wiki forms a graph rather than two disjoint trees.

Source hierarchy

Use sources in this order. When they disagree, log the disagreement in Notes; do not silently pick a winner.

1. The country's central bank, official English-language page on circulating coins. This is the primary source for specifications (metal, diameter, weight, edge, official release date) and for which coins are legal tender. URL examples: cba.am/en/Coins/ (Armenia), nbg.gov.ge (Georgia), cbr.ru (Russia).
2. Numista (en.numista.com) for catalogue numbers (KM#, Schön#, N#), mintage figures when published, rarity index, and confirmation of mint location.
3. Krause Standard Catalog of World Coins via NGC World Coin Price Guide (ngccoin.com/price-guide/world/) for KM# verification and any data the central bank doesn't publish.

When the central bank doesn't publish a figure (this is common for mintage), state explicitly in Notes that no official figure exists, and only then cite Numista/Krause as fallback.

Research procedure

1. Confirm the monetary authority and currency. From the central bank's site, identify the currency, its ISO code, sign, subdivision, and date of introduction.
2. Build the master list of circulating coins. Pull the full list of denominations and years from the central bank's coins page. This is the definitive list; no additions from secondary sources without explicit Notes justification.
3. Pull per-coin specifications from the central bank. For each coin: metal/composition, diameter, weight, edge, official release date. Save the source page URL.
4. Cross-reference Numista and NGC for catalogue numbers (KM#) and any field the central bank doesn't fill (mintage, mint location, die varieties).
5. Log every discrepancy. If the central bank says "aluminium alloy" but Numista says "aluminium-magnesium alloy", note it. If catalogues claim a die variety the bank doesn't recognise, note it. Discrepancies become a Notes bullet; they do not get hidden.
6. Verify the mint. Most post-Soviet states contract foreign mints (Mint of Poland, Royal Dutch Mint, Royal Mint, Casa de Moneda). Confirm via Numista's mint field and any central bank press releases.

Page structure

Every country page has four blocks as direct children of the country page node. Block titles and order are fixed.

Block 1, intro (empty title). One paragraph, three to five sentences. States the currency name, sign, ISO code, date of introduction; the number of regular coin series the country has issued; for each series, the year(s) of issue, the denomination range, the dominant material family; the mint(s) that struck them; current legal tender status. Style: factual, declarative, no marketing voice.

Block 2, "Coins by year". A markdown table. Rows = years (every year a coin was issued, ascending). Columns = denominations (every distinct denomination ever struck, ascending by face value). Cells: the KM# if that denomination was struck that year, em-dash if not. Column headers use the native script of the country's currency where reasonable (e.g. 10 լ for 10 luma, 10 դ for 10 dram). Caption below the table is a single italic line explaining any non-obvious abbreviations and the meaning of empty cells.

Block 3, "Specifications". A second markdown table. One row per distinct coin type (a unique KM#, not per year of issue). Columns in this order: KM# (numeric only, no prefix), Year (first year of issue if multi-year), Denomination (in Latin script for readability), Metal (central bank's own wording), Ø (diameter in mm, one decimal place), Weight (in grams, two decimals where the source provides them), Edge ("plain", "reeded", "segmented reeded", etc.), Released (day-month-year of official circulation start). Sort by series chronology, then by face value ascending within series. Caption below the table is a single italic line crediting the central bank, with a link.

Block 4, "Notes". A bulleted list, in this order: mintage publication status; recognised die varieties; source discrepancies (each on its own bullet, stating both versions and which the table uses); unique tactile or visual features that don't fit in the table; gaps in the KM# sequence; the mint that struck the coins (restated even if mentioned in intro). Each bullet is one or two sentences. Notes is not where deep history goes.

Page placement

The country page lives directly under the wiki root (id 4077), as a sibling of Coins. It is not a child of Coins, because Wikilayer stitches child page content into the parent's rendered body, which creates a "list-then-scroll-through-everything" problem.

The page is linked from the Coins page (id 4610) by adding the country name to the **Countries:** list in the Coins intro.

Sort_key on the country page: pick something between 10000 and 99999 to keep country pages out of the top of the wiki nav. Alphabetical within that range is fine.

Image policy

• Use only images from the country's central bank or other official monetary authority. Public-domain national-mint images are acceptable.
• Do not use hobbyist photographs, eBay listings, Numista user uploads, or any source whose copyright status isn't clear.
• Caption every image with the source and licence. Example: *Image: [Central Bank of Armenia](https://www.cba.am/en/Coins/), public domain.*
• If central bank images can't be uploaded (the host blocks hotlinks and the fetcher can't pass them), the page launches without images; a human adds them manually.

Linguistic conventions

• All wiki content in English by default.
• Native-script abbreviations are allowed in compact contexts (year-by-denomination headers). Fall back to Latin script if the native script renders poorly or readers won't recognise it.
• Currency names use the standard English spelling (dram, lari, hryvnia), not the romanisation of the native form unless the English spelling is unfamiliar.
• "Plain" not "smooth" or "even" for edges, even when the central bank says "even"; this is a translation harmonisation point.
• "Reeded" not "ribbed", same reason.
• "Bimetal" not "bimetallic" as a noun ("the 500-dram bimetal"); "bimetallic" as an adjective in prose is fine.

Out of scope

This standard deliberately leaves out:

• Commemorative and collector coins (precious-metal collector issues, bullion series, regional / theme series).
• Visual design analysis: what's depicted on each coin's obverse and reverse, who designed them, what the imagery means.
• Historical context beyond what fits in the intro.
• Pricing and rarity for collectors: Numista's USD valuations, NGC grading premiums.

These may become separate standards layered on top of this one. For now, a Coins country page is a reference for the working money, not a numismatic monograph.