On Fri, Sep 6, 2013, at 4:29, Tobias Conradi wrote:

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The ISO website also shows ISO 3166:1981 ISO 3166:1988 ISO 3166:1993

Those are all the same standard. Your sources? Mine are pages of the ISO website, among them the two I provided a link for.

You're being absurdly pedantic. They are three _versions of_ one standard - the later version supersedes the earlier ones. This is entirely obvious from the names, and needs no further source.