In November 2015 I produced a blog post on the relative sizes of our national communities and their development over time. When I updated the contributor stats on our wiki a couple of days back and looking at the massive impact the influx of first time users using maps.me have on the contributor numbers (not necessarily on anything else as I have pointed out in earlier posts), I thought it would be interesting to update the numbers and have a look at what has changed over slightly more than a year.

The most notable changes in the top 20 ranking by absolute community size are Russia overtaking France, Ukraine moving up 6 places and the Philippines moving in to the top 20 at the expense of the Czech Republic.

It is reasonable to assume that these changes are mainly due to the differences in the popularity of maps.me, No surprise and expected that it is most popular in Russia and the Ukraine, not so clear why it is so popular in the Philippines:

Numerous small changes in the contributors per capita ranking, but I suspect the fact to take away from this is that even in countries that already had the best results we are still improving the penetration levels.

In the first blog I singled out Germany and the United States as the two largest communities with very different growth patterns. Particularly in Germany there has been some concern as both the number of active contributors over short periods and the absolute number of edits have been decreasing slightly over the last two years. However new contributor influx does not show the same trend and we might put the “negative” trend simply down to the major urban areas of Germany being extremely well mapped.

As in 2015 the trend in the United States is very different, with a very large growth peak in December 2016. 3500 mappers in a month is roughly what would be required to grow at the same rate relative to population as Germany, so this should be a great achievement.

Unluckily it is not.

Closer inspection shows that a large number (in the 1000s) of the accounts created in December and in the preceding months are fake accounts created by one or more SEO companies. While it is rather unclear if the data added itself is legit, the accounts themselves are not.

Back to numbers with a more positive context, the continental distribution of mappers continues to even out, while Europe continues to dominate, both Asia and South America have increased their relative share.

The raw data for the stats is available as LibreOffice Calc files. Notes on the methodology can be found in the original blog post.