Wikidata Map July 2019

It’s been another 9 months since my last blog post covering the Wikidata generated geo location maps that I have been tending to for a few years now. Writing this from a hammock, lets see what has noticeably changed in the last 9 months using a visual diff and my pretty reasonable eyes.

Wikidata “Huge” map generated on the 13th May 2019

Highlighting the changes

Rather than just doing a visual image diff I decided to also make a gif flicking between the two images to highlight changes in a new way.

I used https://ezgif.com to create this gif, simply uploading the two different images and downloading the result.

I also used https://rsmbl.github.io/Resemble.js/ to do the same visual diff that I have used in previous blog posts, highlighting areas of change in pink. The full size image is available on Commons.

Map comparing October 2018 and May 2019 using Resemble.js

Noticeable changes

The snippets below are not a comprehensive list of changed areas, just the places that I noticed with a quick gaze.

If I have missed somewhere please comment and I’ll be sure to update the post!

Ireland & Wales I’m from the UK, so the first thing that I notice is the increase in Wikidata Items in Ireland and Wales. We also start to see an issue with the density sensitivity / density of the current map settings, as most of England is fully saturated and the map will no longer show us new additions here.

Central & Eastern Europe Europe in general sees scattered increases. Ukraine and Germany both stand out as having more significant increases within their boundaries.

Northern Europe Finland sees increases in Northern Europe.

Kenya Not super defined, but Kenya has definitely seen an increase in Wikidata Items.

Australia New south wales appears to have a fairly well defined increase in Wikidata Items.

India There has definitely been some new Wikidata Items or coordinates for what are probably road networks or rivers in India. West Bengal also seems to have had a pretty well defined increase in Wikidata Items.

Mexico I really have no idea what is happening in Mexico. Odd blocks everywhere. If anyone has any ideas let me know! This could be an issue with the map generation? Or as suggested on Twitter, this could be an issue with a mass import of data. Indeed. Mexico uses UTM/MGRS coordinates. Both are in fact given as degree+meters.https://t.co/uIV7eejsMX Pretty sure this isn't your tool but a bad mass import that needs fixing. CC @LucasWerkmeistr — Thiemo Kreuz (@maettig) July 2, 2019

Canada There has been a general increase across the whole of Canada, but no areas really jump out.

Future map thoughts

It’s becoming clear that as Wikidata continues to grow, this map is going to become more and more useless in its current state. Given infinite time it is just going to end up being a bright yellow / white map of the world, not able to show any areas of increase.

Perhaps the map generation needs to be altered to provide different intensity versions, so that we can continue to spot growth in highly populated areas such as England etc.

If anyone wants to get involved with the map code, or maintenance let me know…

Until next time!

Files

All images used in this blog post are released under CC0.

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