Sources & Methodology

Main sources

• Pakistan Bureau of Statistics (PBS), 2023 Census. District and tehsil tables published on the PBS website:
  • Table 1: area, population, sex, density, urban share, household size and growth rate
  • Table 2: urban localities by population
  • Table 11: population by mother tongue
  • Table 12: literacy rate, school enrolment and out-of-school children
• Government notifications and websites. Notifications of provincial revenue departments and boards of revenue, cabinet decisions, provincial codes of law, court judgments and official district websites.
• Established news organisations. Dawn, The News, The Express Tribune, the Associated Press of Pakistan (APP) and international agencies such as Reuters, mainly for recent administrative changes and events.
• Reference works and heritage bodies. Encyclopaedia Britannica, UNESCO and the federal Department of Archaeology and Museums for history, geography and heritage sites.

Wikipedia is used only to find primary sources. It is not cited as the source of a fact.

How district counts are verified

• A district is counted once a government notification creating it has been issued, or once its creation has been reported by an established news organisation citing that notification.
• Districts that have been announced but not notified are listed as "announced" and are not included in the count.
• When sources disagree, we use the most recent official source and describe the disagreement on the province page.
• Each province and territory page shows its district count with the sources behind it. The national total is the sum of those counts.

How census figures are presented

• Figures are taken from the PBS tables, parsed by scripts kept in the site's code repository, and checked against the district totals printed by PBS.
• The 2023 census was taken before several districts were split. For districts created or reorganised since then, we add up the 2023 rows of the tehsils that now belong to the district and say so on the page.
• Literacy is the PBS measure: the share of people aged 10 and over who are literate.
• Numbers are reproduced as PBS publishes them. Percentages computed by us are identified as such.

What we do not publish

We do not publish rumours, unsourced rankings, invented dates, cast lists or ratings. Older free-text descriptions that have not yet been checked against a source are withheld until they are.

Corrections

Anyone can report an error by email to zainkhanpk742@gmail.com. We check the report against a source. If it is confirmed, we correct the page, and the page's "Last updated" date changes. Changes to the site are kept in version control, so earlier versions of a page can be traced.

"Last updated" dates

The date at the bottom of each page is the date that page last changed, taken from the site's version history.