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- Hacker News
- Great article. I wonder if the sum of the land areas of all countries on earth matches the global size of emerged land? Or are there other similar errors?by bambax
- I remember hearing from a Yemeni American in the late 90s that the border with Saudi was not defined (mentioned in the article). I wonder if this could be explained more simply that a few sources didn't bother to update this over time due to the ambiguity, they just carried over what had been published before.by asveikau
- I did not expect this to just be a simple mistake, especially one that's been around for decades. Makes you wonder what other kind of basic facts are wrong.
In the age of satellites, computers, Google maps and the like you would think a mistake like this would be impossible to persist for so long.
by Aerroon - This reminds me of what Deming used to say: there is no correct value for any measurement, there are only the outcomes of methods chosen to measure something.by kqr
- What I wonder is why anyone noticed this in the first place. Who saw the size of the country in Wikipedia and thought, “really? Let me trace that in Google maps, just to be sure…”by burlesona
- 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.by em-bee
- A 100-year-old data bug propagated through the entire knowledge base because nobody bothered to add a test.by MotoriX
- I think a more important question is whether Yemen still exists as as single coherent political entity with the same borders as seen on ANY of those maps, which given the present situation, it clearly does not.
edit: map here https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-updat...
and here: https://yemen.liveuamap.com/
by walrus01