What is the size of Yemen? (2024)
An investigation into why official databases have overstated the size of Yemen by nearly 100,000 square kilometers for a century due to compounding historical reporting errors.
read it A delightful data detective story tracing how a century of geographic errors compounded across major international databases.
summary
A blogger investigates why official geographic sources list Yemen's area as over 555,000 square kilometers when mapping the actual borders yields only around 456,000 square kilometers. Tracing historical records, the author discovers that North Yemen's data relied on a 1904 Ottoman provincial map, while South Yemen's data contained a double-counted governorate from a 1976 World Bank report. These separate errors were combined upon unification and blindly repeated by institutions like the CIA, United Nations, and Wikipedia for decades. The piece highlights how easily institutional data can be corrupted by unverified legacy inputs.
key points
- Official sources like the CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia overstated Yemen's size by roughly 100,000 square kilometers.
- North Yemen's historical area metric was mistakenly pulled from a 1904 Ottoman Empire provincial map of the Yemeni Vilayet.
- South Yemen's area was inflated after a 1976 World Bank report accidentally double-counted the administrative area of Thamud.
who should read it
Data nerds, cartography enthusiasts, and anyone interested in how errors persist in historical datasets.
discussion warm
consensus
Commenters find the persistent data error fascinating and highlight similar historical propagation issues in other datasets, noting that Wikipedia was actually updated with a correct figure shortly after the article was published.
this was posted on 27. of november 2024. on the 3rd of december someone found a correct looking number in a yemen government document which was published in 2005 and updated wikipedia. so at least the country itself was not under any illusion of being bigger than they actually are.
It provides a satisfying resolution by noting that Wikipedia was updated with a verified government figure shortly after the article's release.
Generated by an LLM from the article and thread. Check the sources before relying on it.