Another year, another map, and another Birthday for Wikidata. Last generated in 2024 by @tarrow and @outdooracorn, this year I have put the work in just ahead of the 13th Wikidata birthday to have a look at what’s changed in terms of items with coordinates this past year on Wikidata.
And here it is!
But really you need to look at the diff between previous years to see what has changed!
I have already uploaded a variety of intensities to Commons, and added them to the main map page:
- Level 5 (above) File:Wikidatamap-2025-10-13-items-intensity-5.png
- Level 100 File:Wikidatamap-2025-10-13-items-intensity-100.png
- Level 1 File:Wikidatamap-2025-10-13-items-intensity-1.png
What’s changed?
If we have a look at a flat diff between 2024 and 2025, we can basically see most of the world has been touched in some way, though there appears to be the mostly similar weighting between areas that we see most years:
- The poles lack changes, likely as there just isn’t much there in the first place
- Western Europe sees heavy modifications, as do the more populated areas of North America
- Indonesia sees some strong changes
- New Zealand also is easy to spot by eye
- Taiwan, Japan and South Korea
- Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and areas of Angola
- The Caribbean seems to have quite some activity
- As does Peru and Chile
- Last but not least the islands of Fiji, New Caledonia, Mauritius, Réunion and Hawaii all seem easy to spot
It’s a little easier to see the specific areas if we take out some of the noise, moving from the flat diff to the diff portion from input view.
If we look at the intensity 100 flat diff view, we can find the places that have gone from 0 coverage (in a pixel) to some coverage very easily.
This view highlights:
- Ghana
- Nigeria
- An area of northern Senegal
- India as a whole
- State of Santa Catarine, Brazil
If you spot anything else of note within these diffs, do let me know and I’ll be happy to highlight it in this post.
UI refresh
If you happen to have a laptop and browser with enough memory, you can see view the renderings of these maps, and tweak the various settings such as intensity, view different years, and also enable the other layers using the web UI. Which this year I have given a little refresh (pending a pull request merge)
https://wmde.github.io/wikidata-map/dist/index.html
Beautiful! In the previous version, there was a way to hide the legend (in the upper right corner). Is that feature still available but elsewhere?
It’s currently hidden with a very hard to see < icon on the left, however, there is a pull request up to improve that already