Chart › About

How this atlas is made

Every place on this chart comes from Wikidata, chosen by a rule rather than by taste, and every photograph comes from Wikimedia Commons. Nothing here is written by a machine and nothing is invented.

This is a selection, not a gazetteer. Norway alone has roughly 240,000 islands. The atlas holds 16,931 places in total, because it keeps the ones that are documented — and it caps how many any single country may contribute, so that the map does not become a picture of Scandinavian skerries with the rest of the world missing. If your home bay is not here, that is the cap or the documentation, not a judgement about the bay.

What has to be true for a place to appear

Three things, all checkable:

Coordinates	A real position on Wikidata, taken from the statement value so latitude and longitude are never parsed out of text.
A photograph	An image on Wikimedia Commons. 16,931 of 16,931 places carry one; a place without a picture is not admitted.
Documentation	Coverage in at least a handful of Wikipedia language editions — the exact floor varies by type, because a lighthouse is documented at home and nowhere else while islands are numerous enough to flood the chart.

English is not required

A sibling atlas learned this in public: it demanded an English Wikipedia article, and whole regions came out nearly empty — not because the places were unremarkable but because they are written about in Spanish, or Italian, or Croatian. This atlas takes the article from whichever edition has one, English first and then sixteen others, and says on the page which edition it is reading. 4,239 of the 16,931 places here are documented in a language other than English.

What the ranking means

Places are ordered by how widely they are documented — the number of Wikipedia language editions covering them, and how much those articles are read. That is a measure of fame, not of quality, and certainly not of whether somewhere is a good place to bring a boat. A famous cape may be a miserable anchorage.

What it does not yet know

Being honest about this is more useful than pretending otherwise. The atlas currently carries no depths, no berth counts, no harbour dues, no VHF channels and no shelter ratings, because there is no open dataset of those that could be published honestly. It is a chart of where things are and what they look like, not a pilot book. Do not navigate from it.

Corrections

Nearly every error here is an error in Wikidata, and fixing it there fixes it for everyone rather than just for this site. Each place page links its Wikidata item. If something is wrong in a way that is ours — a mis-typed place, a photograph of the wrong thing, a bad slug — that is worth telling us about.