To fill out the colour codes for a specific language:

• look up a language's vitality rating on these three websites: UNESCO, Ethnologue, Endangered Languages;
• look up these ratings in the table below to find out to what colour codes they correspond;
• fill out the vitality table on the language's fact sheet with the three colour codes: the colour codes can be inserted using the Media Manager (the -button in the toolbar when editing a page). Once in the Media manager, the colour codes are located in the folder “endangerment”.

The colour codes correspond with descriptions of language vitality given by three websites: the website of Unesco's Atlas for languages in danger, the online Ethnologue, and the Endangered Languages website. Each website uses its own, unrelated, system to rate a language's vitality, using terms such as “vulnerable”, “endangered”, “critically endangered”, etc. Mercator's wiki chooses to represent these vitality descriptions with colour codes, so that the viewer can quickly get an idea of the language's vitality.