FilmMap changelog

A crawlable homepage, an image sitemap, and who took every photograph

2026-08-21T12:00:00Z

This atlas has a sibling, The Castle Map, built with the same tools a month earlier and through more weather since. Put side by side on 21 August, the two were level on the basics and FilmMap was behind on the things a search engine or an AI assistant reads first. This release closes the part of that gap that could be closed without touching the page templates, which stay frozen for a few weeks while Google settles its view of the site after two large deploys in August.

The homepage has a crawlable half. Below the map there is now a section that a crawler running no JavaScript can read: what the atlas is, the countries and places with the most on the map, the most covered productions, how the map is built, and eight questions answered in plain words and repeated as structured data. It runs to about 1,200 words with close to a hundred links into the atlas, where the page used to offer 210 words and seven links, on the one address every inbound link points at.

An image sitemap lists 24,473 pages beside the photograph each one shows, so image search can find a place through its picture. The whole index is also available as plain text at llms-full.txt, one line per production and one per place, 11,662 productions and 15,254 places, with the evidence label kept on every line because the label is the claim. The changelog has an Atom feed at /changelog/feed.xml.

Every photograph now has its author and licence on record: 13,967 pictures from Wikimedia Commons, 13,472 with a named photographer and 13,964 with a licence, fetched from Commons and shipped in the open data files as image_by, image_licence and image_licence_url, and returned by the MCP endpoint with every place. Most of those licences make naming the photographer a condition of reuse, and this site had been crediting Wikimedia Commons and nobody else. The pages will show the names once the template freeze lifts; the data is there now so that they can.

Each of the 400 day trip guides has a social card of its own, plotting its places around the city centre inside the 25, 60 and 100 km rings the page uses, so a guide to filming locations near Lyon shared into a chat shows Lyon rather than the world map. The MCP endpoint is registered with the official Model Context Protocol registry as com.thefilmmap/filming-locations. The CSV download, which had been served uncompressed at 7.25 MB, now travels at 1.16 MB.

A deploy gate now reads every one of the 28,108 built pages before anything ships and refuses when a canonical, a description, a heading, a date or an internal link is wrong. Its first run found something. 25 pages linked their Wikipedia evidence to a section whose name still carried a template from the article source, so the link could never land on the section; fixed in the parser and in the stored data. It also counted 534 pages whose descriptions run past what a search result shows, mostly franchise pages listing many places. Those wait for the freeze, and the gate refuses to let the number grow in the meantime.

Later the same day a second sweep of the machine facing surfaces found four more things, all fixed. Anime and manga pages described their subject as a video game in structured data, on 597 pages; the type now follows the medium, and for an anime the Wikidata one liner decides film against series. The 31 invented places carried the coordinates and the country of the real place they stand on as their own, in the one surface a machine reads first; they now say what they are and what they stand on, and carry no coordinates. The preview card text on a game, anime or manga page called its picture a filming location, and so did 1,166 place pages whose card was the atlas picture rather than a photograph; both say the right thing now. The page of invented places described itself with the sentence written for whole countries and regions. And the one malformed Wikipedia link, to a section whose heading begins with a hash sign, is encoded properly.

The photographer field was cleaned on the same pass. Commons prints an unknown author twice, once hidden and once shown, and the first fetch kept both copies as a name on 182 pictures; long upload notes hid the name in a sentence on about 170 more. Both read correctly now, which is why the count of named photographers is 13,472 rather than the 13,571 first reported.

And then the freeze came off. The morning entry above held back every change to the page templates until September, on the belief that two large deploys in August had caused Google to stop serving the site. Search Console, read properly the same afternoon, showed the decline began on 9 August, ten days before those deploys, which is the shape of a new domain losing its first indexing boost rather than a site being punished for changing. So the template work shipped the same day. Every production, place, country and day trip page now answers the questions people ask of it, in plain words and as structured data: 27,406 pages, 100,425 answers, each computed from the page’s own numbers. The photographer and licence now appear under 14,088 photographs, 13,825 of them with a name, and in the structured data as a proper image record. Every place in a country is listed on its country page and every production filmed at a place is listed on its place page, where before the lists stopped at 120 cards and 60 rows; 6,892 production pages now point at more productions from the same country. Meta descriptions that ran past what a search result shows fell from 534 to 184. And the browser is told to connect to the server the photographs actually come from, which it was not before.

Four hundred day trip pages, and the fact check that grew them

2026-08-20T12:00:00Z

The atlas now answers near as well as in. Filming locations near London, near Los Angeles, near 398 other cities: every place within 100 km of the centre, with the distance, the compass direction, what was shot there, and the place a click away. The cities chose themselves from the data. A page exists where at least ten filmed places sit within 100 km and four within 60, and a fame weighted score with a cap of twenty pages per country decides the rest, so London cannot crowd out Dublin.

The evidence rules are the ones the rest of the atlas lives by. A place carried by filming location statements is counted by those alone. A place the atlas holds on prose evidence says so on its row: Bletchley Park, 4 km south east of the Milton Keynes centre, reads one production, per Wikipedia, The Imitation Game. The first cut of these pages gated on statements only and silently dropped every prose evidence place. A fact check before shipping caught Bletchley Park missing from the Milton Keynes page, the gate was widened to count both streams the way the city rankings already do, and the tier grew from 244 pages to 400. Tokyo went from 11 places to 76, because most of what the atlas knows about Tokyo it knows from articles rather than statements.

Every number on every page was verified before it shipped. All 9,709 distance and direction claims across the 400 pages were recomputed with a different formula and matched to the kilometre and the compass point. Every count in every title equals the rows below it. The closest and most filmed claims were recomputed from the data, and the formulas were checked against the world first: London to Paris comes out at 343.6 km, Windsor 33 km west of London.

Two honest limits. Satellite towns ride the circles of their big neighbours, so Basingstoke has a page that looks a lot like west London with the city taken out, which is what being Basingstoke means geographically. And the city pool comes from Wikidata, where a city’s classification is not stable: Los Angeles spent the first build absent because an editor ranked its charter city statement preferred over plain city, and Pereira in Colombia fell out because it was retyped to a class nobody queried. Both are fixed and both fixes are guarded, but the next surprise of that shape is a matter of time, which is why the selection refuses to retire a page once it has been published.

The atlas said Shawshank had no Wikipedia article

2026-08-20T12:00:00Z

Every page here carries one outbound citation, the Wikipedia button in its header, and behind the page a sameAs link telling a search engine which film or place the page is about. Both come from one field, and that field is filled by bulk queries to a public SPARQL server. A degraded server answers a bulk query with a smaller but valid subset rather than an error, and by yesterday evening 3,969 productions and 797 places were carrying no article at all: The Shawshank Redemption, Schindler’s List, Squid Game, the Acropolis of Athens, the Louvre Palace. A check of one hundred of them against Wikidata’s own per item API found 97 with an article. The field was reporting server health, not reality.

What a reader lost: the Wikipedia button on about 3,850 pages, and the machine readable statement of what the page is about on the same pages. Productions below the fame bar also fell out of the Wikipedia harvest, whose corpus rule skips a row with no article, so a film like Arthur the King could say only Dominican Republic while its own article names the shoot in its Production section. Had the harvest re run before this was found, those productions would have dropped out of the corpus and their existing evidence would have vanished from the pages with them.

The fix asks Wikidata’s entity API, item by item, about whatever the bulk queries fail to answer, because an API that answers per item cannot partially succeed in silence. 3,831 productions and 26 places got their article back the same afternoon. The 138 productions and 771 places still without one are now confirmed, item by item, to genuinely have none, which is a fact about Wikipedia rather than a failure here. And the continuity guard that already refused to ship a run that loses places now counts articles on productions too, so this class of loss can never again pass unseen.

The re run surfaced the same disease in the one line subtitles: 3,913 productions and 4,355 places had been shipping no description where Wikidata has one. Film coverage went from 66 to 100 percent, manga from 22 to 100. In total 7,383 of the 27,706 pages changed today and not one page was added, which is the honest shape of the fix: the number of pages was never the problem.

A city page could not tell you what was filmed in the city

2026-08-19T12:00:00Z

A filming location statement names one item and says nothing about what contains it. So this atlas knew that Game of Thrones filmed at Lovrijenac and that Lovrijenac is a fortress in Dubrovnik, and it could not put those two facts together. Dubrovnik’s page counted the six productions recorded against the word Dubrovnik, while the Walls, Stradun, the Rector’s Palace and Trsteno Arboretum sat on pages of their own a few hundred metres away, invisible from the page somebody had actually opened.

Containment is now read from Wikidata as well, property P131, walked all the way up. 26,629 links between places already on this atlas, and 1,449 cities and regions now answer for everything shot inside them. California lists 1,745 productions where it used to list none, because California carries no filming statement of its own and never did. Every row names the place inside where the shoot actually happened, because that is the true version: those films were shot in San Francisco and at Warner Bros in Burbank, not at the point in the middle of the state where the dot sits.

Whole countries are deliberately left out of it, because a country page already does that job. That test asks whether a country page exists for the name rather than whether the place looks like a country, which is what catches Denmark, recorded on Wikidata as sitting inside the Kingdom of Denmark, and the People’s Republic of China, whose country page is at China.

The pages are titled as the question now. They read Movies and TV series filmed in Dubrovnik rather than Dubrovnik, filming locations, and the wording is counted from what is on the page: a place with only a television credit says TV series, and a place that is somewhere a story is set rather than somewhere a camera stood keeps the old wording. There is a ranking of the most filmed cities and regions on the locations index, which is a number this atlas could not produce until now.

Two smaller repairs found while doing it. 148 location pages linked their country to a page that does not exist, because a country earns one only at five locations and the breadcrumb linked it either way: Aden pointed at Yemen, Aleppo at Syria, Aitutaki at the Cook Islands, and every one of those answered Gone. And the sentence quoted from Wikipedia at the top of a location page, saying what was actually shot there, was reading only the 78 notes checked by hand; the 17,327 gathered by machine two weeks ago were shown further down the page and never promoted. 995 pages open with one now.

Still uneven, and in the way that matters here: containment is only as good as Wikidata’s P131, so a place whose article never records what it is inside stays invisible to its own city. Dubrovnik gains no new production at all, because everything shot at its five inner places is already recorded against Dubrovnik too. The page lists the places instead, which is the other half of what somebody asking that question wants.

Kronstadt is a town of 44,000 people and this atlas was calling it a jurisdiction

2026-08-17T12:00:00Z

Alban asked for Kronstadt, which Battlefield 1 was drawn from. The entry written an hour earlier said it was missing and gave a reason, the reason was wrong, and that sentence has been taken out of it. Nothing was locking Kronstadt out. The atlas had it in hand, looked at its class, and refused to pin it.

The class is city municipality, which on Wikidata reaches administrative territorial entity and nothing else. Kronstadt is also filed as a city, but that statement is not the preferred one and this atlas asks for preferred values, so the word city never reached it. A pin in the middle of a county or a province claims something nobody said, which is why the rule exists; a pin on Kronstadt claims exactly what Battlefield 1’s article says.

So instead of one more special case, every class carried by a place this atlas reads as a pure jurisdiction was counted, 290 of them, and the settlement shaped ones were read by hand. 14 join the settlement list: a Russian city municipality, a Moroccan urban commune, an Estonian urban municipality, a London borough, a Galician and an Asturian and a Danish parish, an Irish townland, a Chinese county level city, a Scandinavian city district, a Quebec borough. Kronstadt is on the map, Battlefield 1 carries all five of its places now, and so are Erfoud with six productions, Holte and the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Croydon gained a production it had been keeping in a second copy of itself.

What was refused, and the line is scale rather than wording: a German Landkreis, an English district, a cadastral township. A county is not a place you can stand in. Three of the new items turned out to be a second copy of a town already here, Tallinn, Tartu and Croydon, and they are folded into it rather than drawn twice.

Still wrong. Ten of the places this unlocked are on the map’s doorstep and not through it, because the only production naming them is below the bar this atlas sets for a production: Pushkin, Tafraout, Combarro, Duyun, Bealadangan and five more. And the harvester now reports what it discards, which is how this was found: of 950 modelled on candidates it keeps 597 and drops 121 for a place the atlas does not hold, 139 for a place too coarse to pin, 41 for a work it does not hold and 51 to a stronger claim.

The Netherlands was not a country on this map, and a school was not a place

2026-08-17T12:00:00Z

Alban asked whether anything else was hidden the way Visby was. Three things were, and none of them was about anime.

The Netherlands first, because it is the plainest. Amsterdam carries 46 productions on this atlas and it was shipping with no country and no flag, along with every other Dutch place, and the index of country pages listed 89 countries and no Netherlands at all. The cause is one word on Wikidata: the code NL sits on the Netherlands item ranked deprecated, because the code formally belongs to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and this atlas asks for best ranked values only. So no query ever returned a row naming the country, and every place that pointed at it came out nameless. Six countries were rescued by reading the deprecated code, the Kingdom of Denmark among them.

Then the schools. Every place this atlas admits on weak evidence has to prove it is positively a place rather than something that merely has coordinates, and no school class passed that test: not elementary school in Japan, not Japanese high school, not even university. A school could only get on the map if a filming statement vouched for it, which is why Oxford and Princeton were here and 47 buildings an anime was drawn from were not. 477 school buildings join the atlas: UCLA with 13 productions, Yale, Harvard, Caltech, John Marshall High School in Los Angeles, and on the drawn side Toyosato Elementary for K On, three schools for Your Name and Mikage Elementary for Grave of the Fireflies.

Then Switzerland, found through Heidi. Wikidata files a French commune, an Italian comune, a German and a Spanish municipality under municipality, and this atlas reads that as a settlement. A Swiss municipality descends from administrative territorial entity and nothing else, so every Swiss village was being read as a jurisdiction and dropped. 20 join, including Iseltwald, Andermatt, Brienz and Maienfeld, the town Heidi was drawn from. A coast was in the same position: nothing on the nature list reached it, so Tsurigasaki Beach, the surf break Ride Your Wave was drawn from, had no way in.

That is 522 new locations, 15,249 in all, and 61 of them are places whose only evidence is that somebody drew a cartoon from them.

Still wrong. 165 places carry no country, and most of them should: the Caribbean, Scandinavia, the North Pole are nobody’s. A coast has no size to it on Wikidata, so the East Coast of the United States and the Gulf Coast arrived carrying productions and had to be refused by hand, while the Italian Riviera and the Skeleton Coast were kept, and the line between them is a judgement rather than a rule.

Six places were named on Kiki’s page and the map drew none of them

2026-08-17T12:00:00Z

The morning’s work put Kiki’s Delivery Service on the atlas, drawn from Visby, Stockholm, San Francisco, Lisbon, Paris and Naples. Alban searched for it on the map and Visby was not there. The data was right, both pages were right, and all four of the map’s own surfaces had to be told that this kind of evidence exists.

The one that hid the dot is the layers panel. Its medium rows draw a place when it carries at least one film, series, game or drawn work, and those four flags were built from filming statements and Wikipedia articles only. A place whose only evidence is that somebody drew a setting from it carried no flag at all, so no combination of checkboxes could ever draw it. That was 314 places, which is most of what the widened harvester had just found, and it included Dōgo Onsen Honkan and Jiufen, the two most visited pilgrimage sites in the whole stream.

The other three followed from the same omission. Lighting a production rings and labels its places, and that walk skipped the drawn ones, so Kiki lit nothing. The camera framed the same two lists, so choosing it left the view where it stood. And the search row counted only the first kind of evidence, so the row you have to click to reach six places offered itself as set in 0.

All four read the same three lists now. What is still invisible: 13 places, and deliberately. They are the ones whose only evidence was a sentence in an animated film’s article, which this atlas refuses to read as a filming location, so their cards would be empty. The San Francisco Zoo is the one that keeps coming up.

Kiki’s Delivery Service is on the map now, drawn from Visby

2026-08-17T12:00:00Z

This atlas carries a fourth and weakest kind of evidence: the real place a drawn work was modelled on, taken from the Japanese Wikipedia article that names it. Until today it covered anime and nothing else, and it was missing the film most people would name first. Kiki was not on the atlas at all.

The reason was a word. The Japanese article names Visby three times and says the staff scouted Stockholm and Visby and wove those views into the backgrounds. The harvester was looking for two words, モデル and 聖地巡礼, and neither is in that sentence. The article had been sitting in the cache since 5 August and nothing had read it.

The cue now covers nine ways of writing the same claim, each one measured on its own before it went in. Kiki carries Visby, Stockholm, San Francisco, Lisbon, Paris and Naples, every one of them named in that single sentence. Howl’s Moving Castle carries Colmar, Castle in the Sky carries Wales, Your Name carries Shima and Ise, Ponyo carries Tomonoura, and Porco Rosso carries Dubrovnik and the cove at Zakynthos.

Anime was never the right boundary either. A manga panel, a game’s district and an animated town are the same claim about a drawn setting standing on a real place, so manga, video games and animated films are read the same way now. Where there were 104 works and all of them anime, there are 533 pairings across 264 works: 92 manga, 85 anime, 71 video games and 16 animated films. Grand Theft Auto Vice City stands on Miami, Red Dead Redemption 2 on New Orleans and the Grand Teton, Sailor Moon on Azabu Juban, Gintama on Kabukichō, Frozen on Bergen, Snow White on the Alcázar of Segovia.

What it is still not: this remains the weakest thing said about a place here, and it keeps its own heading and its own words. Nothing was filmed at these places and no story happens in them. Somebody drew them from there.

Still wrong, and found by reading the new rows rather than by any test. Pinocchio arrived carrying a Tokyo hotel, because the article says the hotel was modelled on Tuscany and the guard against a claim running backwards was matching too narrow a phrase; it is fixed, and it now throws out 1,038 pairs in a run. Shrek keeps Palo Alto on thinner ground than the rest, since what was modelled there was a character and not the setting: a real donkey that lived in Barron Park. And live action is not in this at all, because a Japanese article about a live action film uses the same word for the place the camera stood, which is a different and stronger claim than this stream is allowed to make.

The homepage said 88 countries and the panel underneath it said 160

2026-08-17T12:00:00Z

The sentence under the map read: a free interactive map of 14,525 real filming locations in 88 countries. The stat line a few pixels below it read 160. Both were drawn from the same data in the same build, and one of them was answering a different question.

160 is how many countries have at least one filming location on the map, which is what a sentence about coverage means. 88 is how many of those hold at least five, the bar for earning a country page of their own, and that is a display threshold. Four pages were handed the second number in a sentence that meant the first: the homepage, About, Data and the list of what is missing, twice over on most of them because it went into the page description as well as the body. The atlas was underselling itself by 72 countries in the one line somebody else copies.

The country index was right the whole time, and it states the difference more clearly than any fix could: it names all 160 countries and links the 88 that have a page, so a country with two locations is listed there with its count and no link. The description this site publishes for language models had it right too.

Checking that number turned up the same fault in the game. The page said FilmGuessr asks about 1,718 productions; it asks about 1,724. The bars deciding which productions are widely enough known to ask about were written down twice, once in the game and once in the page builder, under a comment saying that changing one meant changing the other. Manga joined the game on 4 August and the second copy never learned it, so six manga were counted out of the published number while the game went on asking about them: Future Diary, The Rose of Versailles, Nodame Cantabile, Orange, Golden Kamuy and Message to Adolf. The builder asks the game itself now, so there is one definition and the two cannot drift apart again.

Worth keeping in mind about the larger number: a country reaches this map only because somebody recorded a filming location there on Wikidata. 160 countries is what has been written down, never everywhere a camera has been.

FilmGuessr opened every round zoomed into the last answer

2026-08-17T12:00:00Z

The reveal flies the camera in to as close as zoom 7 on the place the film was really shot, which is the point of it: you see how far out you were. The next production then came up with the camera still sitting there. One country filling the screen, chosen by the previous question and telling you nothing about this one, so every round after the first began by zooming back out by hand. Click without doing that and you scored a guess against a view of the wrong continent.

The board eases back to the world now, the moment the next production comes up. It is the castle atlas’s behaviour, which had the same fault and fixed it on 9 August, and it is the difference between five rounds and five rounds of housekeeping.

Its zoom floor came across in the same pass. The board would not pull back beyond 1.1, which does nothing on a laptop, where the world already fills the screen and cannot be zoomed out of anyway, and quite a lot on a phone, where it left about a third of the world on screen and the rest a pan away. That is a bad trade in a game whose only question is which part of the world you are looking at. The floor is the castle atlas’s 0.8.

The hover card said where a place ranks before it said what was filmed there

2026-08-17T12:00:00Z

Resting the cursor on a dot used to open a card that spent five lines on the place and one on the films. NX Bridge, one production: the category, the name, the country, then Deep cuts, then #10,894 of 14,525, then #638 of 823 streets and squares, and under all of that, set smaller than any of it, Annie 1982.

The three ranking lines have gone from the preview. They answer a question nobody hovering has asked, and they were pushing down the only one anybody does. Click the dot and all three come straight back, because a pin is a deliberate act and the card that follows it is read for longer than a second. The place’s own page has always carried them too.

What is left is set a size larger. The production rows go from 11.5 to 12.8 pixels and the country line with them, which is still a step under the castle atlas, the sibling this card takes its shape from. Those three lines were 53 pixels, so London’s preview is about 40 pixels shorter even after the type grew: a photograph, a name, a country, five films and a count of the rest.

That count was wrong on 1,422 places, and always in the same direction. A preview draws one of the two evidence lists and hides the other whole, so London offered five films, said and 301 more productions, and was sitting on 493. Los Angeles hid 343 rows behind a number that did not include them, and a place known only from Wikipedia articles, like Shepperton Studios with its 98, said nothing at all about the ones it had left out. The line counts both streams now, which is how the map has always sized the dot and how the place’s own page has always counted. The two lists stay under their own headings, on this card and everywhere else.

The photograph is shown whole now as well. A gradient used to fade the bottom of it into the card, and the text was pulled 36 pixels up into that fade to save height. The two went together and they cost the bottom third of every picture, which on a 96 pixel strip is most of the subject: London was a skyline with its river greyed out. The castle atlas dropped the same pair on 5 August for the same reason, that the picture is the thing. The height it takes back is the height the ranking lines gave up.

A card with nothing to list now says so. Thirteen places out of 14,525 sit on this map with no production behind them at all. They arrived on a sentence in an animated film’s article, that claim was withdrawn on 4 August because nothing is filmed in an animated film, and the dot stayed. The card used to answer with silence, which reads as a rendering failure rather than as an answer. It now says that nothing on this atlas is recorded as filmed or set there, which is what those places’ own pages have said since 8 August.

Five other repairs went with it.

The category rank disagreed with the world rank, and one card said both. San Francisco Zoo read Deep cuts, #14,492 of 14,525, and on the next line #35 of 2,053 landscapes and nature. The world rank is recomputed when the atlas loads, precisely because a place that was ranked by a cartoon cannot keep that position once the cartoon is withdrawn. The category rank was still being counted off the file in the order it was written. It is now counted in the same order as the world rank. The Zoo says #2,039. Twenty six places were flattered by more than 200 positions, and four in five were out by one or two.

A photograph that never arrives no longer leaves a hole. Wikimedia Commons files get renamed and deleted while this atlas keeps the old address, and a card whose picture failed held a 96 pixel strip of nothing and pulled its own heading up into it.

The card kept the wrong place when the map moved and the mouse did not. Every route into the hover test needed a mouse movement, so rolling the wheel to zoom in on the dot you had just found left the card describing what used to be there, pinned to where it used to be, until you nudged the pointer. A region jump and a link into the map did the same. The test is now run again at the cursor as soon as the camera settles.

The layer swatches in the panel wore the night colours on the day chart. They are a legend for the dots, and one of the pairs is not a shade apart: streets are bright pink on the night chart and dark maroon on the paper one, so the panel was showing a colour that appeared nowhere on the map beside it.

FilmGuessr never followed the day chart at all. Anyone who had chosen the paper theme got a game with parchment panels over a near black board, and the row of links along the bottom of the page was dark ink on that board, which is to say invisible. The board flips with everything else now.

And thirteen place pages were titled drawn from for 0 animes. The same thirteen, and the same cause: the title fell into the last branch of a ladder that assumed there was at least one anime left to name. The sentence on the page itself was fixed on 8 August. The title, which is the line a search result shows, was not.

Still wrong: those thirteen places keep their dots. Nothing was filmed at them and nothing is set in them, so the honest answer may be to take them off the map rather than to explain them, and that is a decision about the dataset rather than about the card.

A search result that answers the question, and a page that stops repeating itself

2026-08-16T12:00:00Z

Google shows this atlas on the first page for questions like where was Community filmed, and almost nobody clicks. Last week it counted 74,300 of those appearances and 500 visits. The reason turned out to be readable in the results themselves.

A film whose locations come from its Wikipedia article was being described like this: filmed in Ouarzazate and 2 more places, per its Wikipedia article’s Filming section, and then Wikidata records the shoot only as Malta and Morocco. That is Gladiator, and the sentence named one of its three places and spent the rest on a footnote about a database. It now names all three. Nothing has been hidden or softened. The page still says, in bold, that Wikidata itself records only the countries, and it still says that a sentence in an article is weaker evidence than a statement. That belongs on the page. It does not belong in the 160 characters a search result gives you to decide whether the answer is here.

The 817 pages that have no location at all keep saying so. What changed there is only the last few words: they used to finish by telling you there is no pin on the map, and they now finish by telling you what the page does hold, which is why the record stops where it does and what the atlas has mapped in that country.

The link from a page back into the map also changed shape. It used to read thefilmmap.com/?title=gladiator and it now reads thefilmmap.com/#title=gladiator. To you it is the same link and old ones still work. To a search engine the first form looked like a separate page, and there were thousands of them, all showing the same map. Bing had indexed thirty of those and none of the film and location pages they came from, which matters because that index is what Microsoft’s assistant reads when it answers a question about a film.

Pages now also tell your browser when they last changed, which they never did before, so coming back to one costs almost nothing. The same fact was costing Google a third of its visits here, refetching pages that were identical to the copy it already had.

Still true, and the reason none of this is a fix: 3,898 productions on this atlas have no dot at all, because nobody has written down where they were shot in a form a map can use. The work list at /gaps/ names every one of them.

Passing the contrast test is not the same as being easy to read

2026-08-16T12:00:00Z

The type on this site was lifted off the floor earlier the same day and it still read grey, so it was measured again, this time against the sibling atlas rather than against a standard.

A colour census of worldtrainmap.com counts exactly two colours of word on a page: plain white, and white at 70 percent for the small marks beside it. This site had six steps between 65 and 90 percent and it put its most used step at the very bottom. On one listing page that came to 81 runs of text at 65 percent against 64 at full strength, which is why the copy a reader met first was the palest thing in front of them.

The ramp is now two levels and nothing else. Full strength for the words that are the line: the prose, the place names, the production rows, the values and the links. Seventy five percent for the marks beside them: years, counts, country codes, breadcrumbs, section labels and the small icons. A bare separator dot carries no words and stays quieter. That is 230 places in the markup, and the faintest readable thing on the site now measures 7.61 to 1 by day and 10.79 to 1 at night.

The card that follows your cursor was the complaint that started this, and colour was only half of its problem. It is the one surface that is dragged around the map, so it spends its life over the busiest part of it, and it was drawn on glass that let 30 percent of the map through. The map ran along behind the words. That never failed the contrast test, because the test assumes the background holds still, and this one changed underneath every letter.

It is now drawn at 90 percent with an edge you can see, which is what the same card does on the sibling atlas. The panels in the corner are unchanged at 70 percent, because they sit over open water and the glass is the point of them.

Still true and worth stating: the day chart has less room than the night one, because its ground is warm paper rather than something close to white. That is the reason this site sits at 75 percent where the sibling sits at 70.

The text was too faint to read, and the header carried ten links

2026-08-16T12:00:00Z

Two complaints, and both of them measured worse than they looked.

The colour first. Body text here was a soft grey, and every caption, credit, year and breadcrumb dimmed that grey again with an opacity step, so the faintest type on the site was three steps away from a base that was already not white. On the night chart the breadcrumbs and the footer measured 3.79 to 1, against a floor of 4.5 to 1 that ordinary text is meant to clear.

On the day chart the same text measured 2.35 to 1 and the navigation measured 2.90 to 1, which is copy you can see is present and cannot comfortably read. Counted across one listing page, 81 of 318 separate pieces of text sat under the floor.

The base is now plain white on the night chart and a near black ink on the day one, and nothing a reader is meant to read is allowed below 65 percent of it. 157 places in the markup were lifted to that floor. The one exception is the separator dot between items, which carries no words and stays quieter on purpose. The gold that marks kickers and links was deepened on the day chart too, because it measured 4.49 to 1 and it is set at ten pixels in capitals, which is small text by every definition. That same listing page now fails nothing in either theme, and the faintest thing left on it measures 8.44 to 1 at night and 4.86 to 1 by day. The palette is ported from the sibling atlas at worldtrainmap.com, which made the same repair on 12 August after a reader wrote in to say the copy was too faint.

The header second. It carried ten links in one flat row of small grey type. On a 360 pixel phone that came to 157 pixels of navigation, six wrapped lines of it, before a word of the page itself.

Nothing marked which section you were in, and the bar scrolled away on lists that run to thousands of rows.

It now carries five: the map, films and series, locations, scenes and FilmGuessr. They are bigger and bolder, the section you are in is marked by a gold underline as well as brighter ink so it does not depend on colour alone, and the bar stays at the top of the window while you scroll. The same header is 83 pixels on a phone with all five links on one line, and 54 pixels on a tablet.

What that cost. Games, anime, manga, franchises and countries left the header. All five are in the footer, which already listed every one of them except franchises, so no page lost a link to any other. A reader inside anime or games is still shown as being under films and series.

Two limits worth stating. On a 320 pixel phone, the smallest size still in real use, the row of five is 21 pixels too wide and slides sideways instead of fitting. And FilmGuessr never lights up as the page you are on, because the game is a separate shell that draws its own header.

The sitemap told Google that all 26,833 pages changed today, on every deploy

2026-08-10T12:00:00Z

Search Console says 16,300 of these pages are indexed and 7,744 more are known to Google and waiting for a crawl that has not come. While that queue sits there, the sitemap was stamping every one of the 26,833 URLs with the same date, because they all shared one. A single top up of the descriptions file moved that date, so a page nobody had touched in two weeks claimed to be new.

Two things follow and both are bad. The fifteen hundred pages that really did change look exactly like the twenty five thousand that did not, so crawls get spent re fetching pages identical to the copy Google already holds, instead of reaching the tail that has never been fetched at all. And a date that moves in lockstep across a whole site is the pattern Google says it learns to ignore, which throws the signal away for good.

Each page now carries its own date. The page is hashed, the hash is remembered, and the date only moves when that page content moves. Two things stay out of the hash: the date itself, which would be circular, and the bundler fingerprints in the script filenames, because a JavaScript change is not a content change.

Proved both ways before shipping, because a freshness claim that cannot be trusted is worse than none. Built twice with nothing edited in between: 26,831 unchanged, 0 changed. Then one line of markup added to the entity pages: 26,054 changed and 777 correctly left alone, those 777 being the index and A to Z pages that carry no film or place of their own.

Honest limit. Today every page still says today, because there is no record of when each one last changed and inventing one would be the same lie in a different shape. The record starts now, so the next data change is the first one that gets told apart.

Also added, one string missing from a site whose whole provenance claim is Wikidata: the Wikidata item id itself, in machine readable form, on every film, series, game, anime, manga and place, and on each pin listed on a film page. A name and a year make a film that shares its name with two others merely probable. A Q id makes it certain, and this atlas has one for everything by construction. No new pages, no extra crawling, one more string in markup that ships anyway.

Anime had no descriptions at all, and the reason was a rule of mine

2026-08-10T12:00:00Z

A card can carry one sentence from Wikipedia saying what actually happened at a place. Films had 3,782 of them, series 654, video games 152, and anime had zero. Manga had two.

Two separate things were wrong. The first is mine to own. This atlas has a rule that nothing is filmed in an animated film, which is true and which is why a Disney feature is not credited with a shoot at the zoo its artists visited. That rule was applied to the descriptions as a blanket ban, so every sentence about an anime was thrown away unread. All 34 of them turned out to be sentences about where the work is SET, which is exactly the claim the map makes for a drawn work. Set in 1963 Yokohama. Set in the city of Kochi. Free is set in the town of Iwatobi, which is based on Iwami, Tottori. The ban now applies to the claim rather than to the medium: a filming sentence about a drawn work is still refused, a setting sentence is kept.

The second is about which article gets read. The descriptions were only ever taken from the production own article, and that works for a film, because a film article has a section about the shoot. A game article says what world it is set in and rarely names a real street. An anime article in English says almost nothing. The place own article says both, so it is now read as well: 6,979 town, building and island articles, from which 1,021 sentences came back. Grandfather Mountain says the scene where Forrest Gump runs on a curvy mountain road was filmed there. Nishinomiya says much of Grave of the Fireflies is set there. Shimokitazawa says it is the primary setting of Bocchi the Rock. Every quote links the article it was read from, which for these is the place rather than the production, because crediting the wrong page is not crediting anything.

Then Alban asked whether it could be better still, so four more routes were measured and two of them turned out to be nothing. Place articles that mention a production almost always link it, so reading the unlinked italic mentions would add three sentences in total. And a video game development section links its studio, its engine and its people, never the real streets it copies: sixty games, sixty nine development sections, zero descriptions. Both routes are closed with numbers rather than with a hunch.

The other two were real, and both were mine to fix. The first is that a place article says "It" when it means itself, and the sentence filter threw away every sentence that opened that way. On a card headed Ouarzazate, "It was the filming location for the fictional city of Agapenta in the fourth season of the Netflix series Outer Banks" is complete. Fifty eight cards gained one that way, including Snoqualmie Falls for Twin Peaks and Grosvenor Square for Bridgerton.

The second is the whole anime layer. This map pins the places an anime was DRAWN FROM, sourced from the Japanese articles, and the new harvest skipped that stream entirely, so 145 pairings could not be described and their places were never even read. They are now, and the sentences are the best on the page: the Studio Ghibli diary saying the museum bathhouse inspired the one in Spirited Away, the forests of Yakushima inspiring Princess Mononoke, Manoyama in Sakura Quest modelled after Nanto, Michina in the Pokemon film based on Meteora, Nordlingen as Princess Tutu. Note what that needed: "based on" and "inspired by" are phrases this atlas normally refuses, because they hide a two step claim, and on a drawn from pin they are the only correct words.

Where that leaves the count: film 4,073 productions with a description, series 701, games 160, anime 19, manga 12.

The honest part. Anime and games gained the least, and it is not for want of trying. Of the 2,608 game pairings still without a sentence, the place article mentions the game at all in 37 cases, and for anime it is 17 of 314. English Wikipedia simply does not write down where most games and anime are set, from either end, and a Japanese sentence is no use here because a translated quote is not a quote. Series were the real winners, up 167 descriptions.

Three bugs found by reading the output rather than the code. Footnote text was leaking into quotes, so Doune Castle read "used as a location in Outlaw King, Outlaw King Netflix a 2018 historical action drama" and the Ambassador Hotel one ended "the TV series Angel. Commentary." A verbatim quote that contains words the article does not say there is not verbatim, and both are fixed. Sydney article lists nine of our films in one sentence, which got quoted under seven separate pins; a sentence naming four or more productions is now read as a filmography and dropped. And Long Beach says Freedom Writers, although not shot there, was based on a school in the town, which is true and was about to be printed under a pin claiming the opposite.

That last one sent me through all 15,790 descriptions looking for the same shape, and it found 21 more that have been live since the fifth of August. The worst read "The scenes involving the Tate and Polanski house were not filmed at Cielo Drive" on the card for Cielo Drive. About half of the 21 are the opposite case and are the best writing on the page, the shape "not on a studio set, but in the Ennis House", so the rule keeps a denial that names somewhere else and drops one that names nowhere. Nine of that shape remain and one of them is still wrong: the Elysee Palace card keeps a sentence saying the sequence was shot at the Hotel de Soubise and not there. It needs a different fix and it is written down.

Three quarters of the manga had no subtitle, and it was one word in a query

2026-08-10T12:00:00Z

Every page here carries a one line description under its title, the kind that reads "2004 anime film directed by Mamoru Oshii". Films had one on 8,991 pages out of 8,995. Manga had one on 60 out of 231, and anime on 170 out of 298.

The cause is embarrassing and it is not Wikidata. The query that collects those lines asks for works that have a filming location, because that is what it was written for. An anime is on this map because of where it is set, not where a camera stood, so it has no filming location at all and could never match. Neither could most games, nor any place that is only here because a game is set there.

Asked properly, Wikidata had an English description for 416 of the 422 titles that were missing one.

So: anime 57 percent to 100, manga 26 percent to 100, video games 94 percent to 100, and 101 more places got theirs. Six titles worldwide still have none, and Wikidata does not have those either.

Nothing was rewritten. Every line is Wikidata own text, and no existing one changed.

The near miss is worth recording, because it nearly shipped. The gap looked like a language problem, and 306 of those 422 do have a Japanese description, so the plan was to write English subtitles automatically from the class and the year. That would have put generated prose on 299 pages over a field the source was already answering. Measuring the source first is the only reason it did not.

The layer panel was thirty rows in one column

2026-08-10T12:00:00Z

Opening Layers unrolled everything at once: eight place types under four headings, four production types, a three sentence footnote about why the counts overlap, four fame tiers and six region jumps. Reaching the fame tiers meant scrolling past all of it, nothing could be put away, and with the panel shut there was no sign that anything had been switched off.

It is now four folding groups, each with its name and how much of it is on: Place types 8/8, Production types 4/4, How famous 4/4, Jump to. Everything is one line until you ask for it. A dot on the closed Layers header means some of the map is hidden, and one button brings all of it back.

Borrowed wholesale from the castle map, which has worked this way for weeks.

The Soviet Union and Russia were two dots, and one card had both

2026-08-08T12:00:00Z

Where a story is set gets written by whoever edited the item, so one game came back as the Soviet Union and the next as Russia, and this map drew a dot for each. Eleven works were filed under both kinds at once. Command and Conquer Red Alert 2 listed the Soviet Union beside France, Germany and Mexico. Street Fighter II listed it beside Japan, Brazil and Thailand. One card, a vanished empire sitting in a row of countries as though they were the same kind of thing.

Ten states that no longer exist now fold into the country holding the ground today. The Soviet Union and the Russian Empire become Russia, which goes from 37 works to 58. The Roman Empire and Ancient Rome become Italy, 34 to 49. Byzantium becomes Turkey, Prussia becomes Germany, the Ming dynasty and the Chinese Empire become China, the Persian Empire becomes Iran, the British Empire becomes the United Kingdom. The country dots went from 117 to 107.

Korea is deliberately left alone. Every other item here has one successor and that one has two, so choosing South would be inventing an answer the data never gave.

Worth being plain about what this costs. A game set in the Roman Empire now shows a dot in Italy, and the empire reached from Scotland to Syria, so the pin is a rougher claim than the name it replaced. These were always the coarsest thing on the map, drawn only for works whose setting is recorded no more finely than a whole state, and the dot was an approximation before the empire arrived. One approximation reads better than two.

Shepperton Studios was missing, and most of this map is still a city

2026-08-08T12:00:00Z

Pinewood was here with 254 productions. Elstree, Leavesden and Cinecittà were here. Shepperton was not, and neither was Babelsberg, the oldest large film studio in the world. The reason is small and stupid: Wikidata has no coordinates for either of them. The whole pipeline needs a point to draw a pin, and English Wikipedia has had both points in the article all along.

Seven studios arrived when that was allowed as a fallback. Shepperton with 99 productions, which puts it straight into the busiest places on the atlas, Babelsberg with 38, Twickenham with 18, Silvercup with 16, Nu Boyana with 10, Steiner with 7 and Bavaria Film with 4. Nothing was lost.

The table is coordinates only. Everything in it still has to pass the same two gates every place faces, and most of the candidates died there: Nike, the CIA, Ferrari, Leica and the Directors Guild were all named in somebody or other article and all thrown out. Two got through that should not have.

Wikidata files a visual effects house as a film studio, so Framestore and eBay briefly put 24 productions on a Soho post house and a corporate campus where no camera has ever rolled. Post production houses are now left out by hand, because a rule that reads categories cannot tell a sound stage from a company that renders pixels afterwards.

Now the part that matters more, and it is not good news. This fix moved 46 productions. **6,585 are still pinned no finer than a city**, which is 52 percent of everything here, and two thirds of all the links on this map land on a city or a country rather than on somewhere you could stand. Five ways of fixing that were measured today and four of them are dead ends. Wikipedia category trees name countries and states, not buildings. Reading a place article to find the films that used it yields 0.08 new links per article. The 60 percent of parsed evidence this atlas throws away is genuinely rubbish, phrases like principal photography and 35 mm film. And the prose parser has already read every article it can reach.

So when this map says a film was shot in Vancouver and stops there, that is usually the end of what anybody has written down, not laziness at this end. The way that changes is somebody adding a filming location to Wikidata, and /gaps/ lists the productions where the article already names the place and the data does not.

A heritage listing was deleting the place it protects

2026-08-08T12:00:00Z

Vasquez Rocks was not on this map. Wikidata records it as a filming location for 18 productions, four of which were already here, and it is the rock formation behind half the alien planets in television. It was missing for a reason that had nothing to do with Star Trek.

Every place here is sorted by what Wikidata says it is, and one of those rules exists to stop a pin landing in the middle of a country. If an item is a jurisdiction, a state, a province, a region, then a dot at its centre would claim something the statement never said, so it stays as text instead.

Vasquez Rocks is recorded as a park and also as a historic district, and in Wikidata a historic district is filed under district, which is filed under administrative territorial entity. So the atlas read a heritage listing as a unit of government and dropped the park.

A listing says a place is protected. It never says a place is a government, so it no longer counts as one here. The same run fixed the matching case: an administrative label can no longer erase a built site, only open land, because Sicily really is an autonomous region and a dot in the middle of it would be a lie, while a fort, a church, a cosmodrome or a ranch is somewhere a person can stand whatever else is filed on it.

Twenty five places came back and nothing was lost. Vasquez Rocks, named in a filming statement by eight productions and in the Wikipedia article of five more, Bodega Bay from The Birds, the Palace of Fine Arts from Vertigo, the Georgetown church from The Exorcist, Medfield State Hospital from Shutter Island, Crossroads of the World from L.A. Confidential, North Island from Top Gun, the Cumbres and Toltec railroad from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Columbia State Historic Park from High Noon, Carroll Avenue from Charmed, the West Virginia Penitentiary from Mindhunter, Baikonur, Colonial Williamsburg, Glasgow Cathedral, Hollywood Forever, Fort MacArthur, Fort Tryon Park, Jones Beach, Volunteer Park, Mount Hope Cemetery, Puerto Madero and four more. The atlas went from 14,503 places to 14,528.

Still wrong, and worth saying plainly. Three towns in Georgia came back as landmarks rather than as towns, because Wikidata models them only as a municipality of Georgia and that class never reaches human settlement, so the dot is in the right spot with the wrong shape. Lake Constance and Lake Lugano are still missing for the same family of reason, filed as land that belongs to no Swiss municipality. And the rule that found this one is narrow: it knows about historic districts, so if another kind of designation is deleting other places, it is still deleting them.

Found by accident, which is the uncomfortable part. Nobody reported it. It surfaced while checking what this site actually held for people who write about Star Trek locations, and the answer was everything except the one place they would look for first.

The map was too American, and the floor was the lever

2026-08-08T12:00:00Z

Four people had said the same thing by the start of August. On Tumblr, hauntedbloodywhirlpool wrote that it was “way too america weighted” and, after actually going to the site, that it was “literally just whats famous in western countries, vast majority just hollywood”. everentropy asked whether only English language films were included, and said that would bias the data a lot. On Lemmy, dual_sport_dork had made the Bollywood version of the same point and FluidBeef said India looked weirdly quiet. They were right, and the number was worse than it felt: of the 7,952 films and series here that had a recorded original language, 5,895 were in English. That is 74.1 percent.

The fix was not where I expected it to be. A production gets on this map either by clearing a global fame bar, 25 Wikipedia languages for a film, or by being near the top of its own country. Widening that second door from 300 titles to 600 sounded like the answer, and it is not: measured against Wikidata it lets in 692 productions and every one of them is Italian, German, French, Canadian or Spanish. Not one is Indian, Japanese, Korean or Latin American, because those countries do not have 300 productions clearing the old floor of 8 languages in the first place, so the quota never reached down to them. The floor was the thing in the way, not the ceiling.

Both moved, the quota to 600 and the floor to 5. The atlas went from 10,403 productions to 12,634 and from 13,397 places to 14,503, and the English share fell from 74.1 percent to 64.5. France passed the United Kingdom into second place. India went from 310 to 425, Hong Kong from 154 to 268, Italy from 639 to 986, Spain from 436 to 787, Canada from 449 to 755, South Korea from 194 to 248, Mexico from 174 to 226, Sweden from 168 to 246. Mumbai went from 23 recorded shoots to 30, and India from 348 mapped places to 382.

Still wrong, and worth saying plainly. America did not shrink. It went from 5,733 to 6,022, because a co production carries several countries of origin and American money sits inside a lot of other countries’ films, so the share moved because everybody else grew faster rather than because Hollywood stood still. The new admissions are thinner fame by construction, five Wikipedia languages rather than twenty five, and a few of them are early cinema catalogue entries rather than anywhere you would want to go, Patineur Grotesque of 1897 among them. And none of this touches the real ceiling: it only decides who is allowed in, and it cannot invent a filming location that Wikidata does not record. Most of the best known Indian films still carry no filming statement at all. That one is fixable by anyone who edits Wikidata, and the page at /missing/ says how.

Reading those threads properly for the first time turned up something else. bigtuna108 had written on Tumblr that the map did not know where Supernatural or the Stargate series were filmed. Both were quietly fixed four days later by the Wikipedia reading and nobody ever told them, so: the Stargate series shows seven places now and Supernatural two, which is every place its article links and no more. heymerle pointed out that downtown Los Angeles stands in for New York and even for China, which is true, and is exactly why no page here will tell you which scene was shot where.

The fame bands were rebuilt the same day. Iconic, Renowned and Notable used to be rank positions, the first hundred rows and so on, which quietly meant something different every time the atlas grew: by this morning Deep cuts held 92 percent of the map and the filter could no longer narrow anything. They are now a language count on the most covered production at the place, 85, 60 and 38, which puts 4, 13 and 30 percent into the three named bands and cannot drift again.

A game set in a city rather than in a country, and manga on the map

2026-08-07T12:00:00Z

Alban asked whether more games and manga could be placed at something more specific than a country. The honest answer from Wikidata was no: its narrative location property is written at story scale, and measured across every game here it records 0 settings to a district, 0 to a county and 724 to a country and nothing finer. That measurement was right about Wikidata and wrong about Wikipedia, which keeps the missing layer in its category tree.

“Video games set in New York City” holds 502 articles. Japanese Wikipedia has a tree for the same thing, and it goes down to the ward. So the atlas now reads those categories, in English and in Japanese, for the three media it places by where they are set. 1,643 places across 886 games, anime and manga came out of it, every one of them labelled and linked to the category it came from. Call of Duty: Black Ops II sat on a dot in the middle of the United States and now sits on San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Singapore. Grave of the Fireflies had no pin at all and now has Kobe and Nishinomiya. 140 games arrived that were not here at all, because Wikidata records no setting for them and a category does: JFK Reloaded in Dallas, Tony Hawk on five American cities. A category resolving to a whole country is thrown away rather than added, because a country is the thing this was built to get past.

Manga is new, and it is here because of the same source: Wikidata records a narrative location for 27 manga in the world, which is not a medium, while Japanese Wikipedia files hundreds of them under the ward or the city they happen in. 231 of them are on the map, Doraemon in Nerima, Barefoot Gen in Hiroshima, Initial D in Odawara. They share the anime row of the filter, because they are one shelf to a reader and most anime began as a manga, and they keep their own pages at /manga/, because a manga is not an anime.

Still wrong or missing. A category is an editor’s judgement rather than a sourced statement and it is weaker evidence than a Wikidata claim, which is why it is never mixed into the statement list. 608 games are still on a country dot, because nobody has filed them anywhere finer.

And the Caribbean is a pin, inherited from the older classifier, which is about as coarse as a country while not being one.

Thinner dots, no globe, and a colour of its own for a whole country

2026-08-05T12:00:00Z

Three things Alban asked for while looking at the map. The dots were too fat. Across the United States and western Europe they stopped being dots and became one mass, which is the opposite of what a map of 13,191 places is for. Every radius is down by about a quarter, the ring around each one is thinner because a 0.6 pixel outline on a 1.9 pixel circle is a third of it and reads as bulk rather than as an edge, and the halo under each dot shrank to match.

The gap between the quietest place and the busiest also narrowed, from two and a tenth times to one and eight tenths, so Los Angeles still says it holds 822 productions without swallowing the coast it sits on. Nothing was removed and nothing is hidden at any zoom, which is the one rule this map has never broken. The globe is gone, and so is the button that offered it. The sister atlases greet you on a sphere and this one now does not, because a sphere hides half the dots behind the planet and this atlas is a distribution before it is a place: the flat chart shows Los Angeles, London and Tokyo at once, which is the shape of the data and the first thing worth seeing. And a whole country now has a colour of its own.

A game recorded as set in Eastern Europe and nothing finer gets a dot at the middle of it, and that dot used to be grey, one shade from the grey that means an invented place, so the two weakest claims on the map were also the two hardest to tell apart. Countries and regions are orange now. They are the only orange on the map and they read at world view, which is where a claim that vague most needs to be recognised for what it is.

Still wrong or missing.

Central London is dense enough that its dots still touch, because 400 filming locations inside the M25 is a true fact about London rather than a drawing problem.

A quote that only said a shoot happened here is now no quote at all

2026-08-05T12:00:00Z

Alban asked whether the sentences under a pin could say more than that something was filmed there, and they could, because the code picking them was scoring the wrong thing. The test for a descriptive sentence contained the words shot, filmed and set, so “Filming took place at Pinewood Studios” counted as descriptive and could beat “The Golden Dragon casino in Macau was constructed on a sound stage at Pinewood”. A pin under a production already says filming happened there, so a quote repeating it was the one thing on the card that cost space and added nothing. The test now looks for what the place WAS: stood in for, doubled as, used for, the location of, was built, the garden of. A sentence that is only a schedule is not merely outranked, it is thrown away, so where the article offered nothing better there is now silence instead of filler. 4,500 pairings lost their sentence that way and the atlas carries 14,812 rather than 19,312. Almost nothing good went with them: sentences that genuinely say what a place stood for held at 1,350 against 1,357, while the total fell by a quarter, so what was cut was very nearly all filler. Measured with a deliberately harsh yardstick, quotes that say nothing beyond a shoot happening fell from 47.7 percent to 35.8.

That is an improvement and not a cure, and the honest version is worth writing down: the first measurement of this claimed the problem had gone from 18.7 percent to 0.1, and it was wrong, because it was written with the same blind spot as the filter and neither of them looked for the words took place. A test that shares its author’s assumptions will always agree with him.

Still wrong or missing. Roughly a third of the remaining sentences still say little, and some of those are unfairly counted: “Downtown portions of the fictional town of Greenbow were filmed in Varnville, South Carolina” names the fictional town and is a good sentence the yardstick calls empty. A few genuinely off topic ones survive, including a sentence about a production dispute that mentions no place at all. And the quotes are clamped to two lines on a card, so a long one is read at its source.

The card stopped eating the scroll wheel, and the quotes on it got short

2026-08-05T12:00:00Z

A card floats over the dot it describes, which is exactly where your cursor already is, so the moment one opened the wheel stopped zooming the map. It went nowhere at all: the card is a real scroll container and the page behind it cannot scroll, so the gesture was swallowed.

The rule now is the card’s own content. If it has something to scroll, the wheel scrolls it, which is what you want on Pinewood Studios and its 124 productions. If it does not, the wheel was never meant for the card and is handed to the map, so zoom behaves as though the card were not there. Alban asked for this after using the same fix on the castle atlas. And the quoted sentences are two lines now instead of a paragraph. Wikipedia writes to 240 characters and a card carrying three of those was a wall of text sitting on top of the map, which is the one thing a map should never have. The sentence is clamped by the browser and never cut: the whole of it is still in the page, still selectable, still read out by a screen reader, and hovering shows it. Editing the words would break the rule the entire feature rests on, that they are Wikipedia’s and nothing here is paraphrased, and the attribution link stays under every one of them because that is a licence condition rather than a courtesy. The two changes shipped together on purpose: shorter quotes drop most cards below the height where they scroll, which is precisely when the wheel goes back to the map.

Still wrong or missing. A card that does scroll keeps the wheel until you move off it, so on a very tall card you still have to leave the card to zoom.

Where is Super Mario Bros. set? The atlas can finally answer that, and the answer is nowhere

2026-08-05T12:00:00Z

A film Wikidata records only as a country has had a page here for weeks saying exactly that, and it is one of the most defensible pages on the site: Casablanca is California, Gladiator is Morocco and Malta, no pin, no guess. Video games got silence instead. 424 famous games and anime now get the same page they always should have had. 156 are set somewhere real and far too large to put a dot in, so the page names it and says why there is no pin: Half-Life 2 in Eastern Europe, Far Cry 2 in Central Africa, Assassin’s Creed in the Holy Land, Travian in the Roman Empire, Resident Evil 5 in Africa, Super Mario Odyssey on the Moon. 268 are set in a place that does not exist at all, which is a different sentence and gets one: the Mushroom Kingdom, Xen, SimNation, The Underground, Myst Island, Kaer Morhen. An invented place has no coordinates because it is not anywhere, and this atlas will not borrow real ones for it unless Wikidata says which real place it stands for, which for Liberty City and Vice City it does and they have been on the map all along.

The games this atlas holds went from 1,350 to 1,712.

Two faults were found on the way and the second is the one worth writing down. A game whose only setting was too coarse to map was dropped in silence, because the join that keeps a country level statement for a film had no matching line on the set in side: the film branch said keep it, the game branch said skip. Worse, admission for a game asked whether Wikidata says where it is set AND whether this atlas can map it, so a game set in Eastern Europe never became a title at all, and since the list of known games is built from that same query it was then typed a film and judged against the film bar.

Admission now asks only the first question.

Still wrong or missing. The setting name is read from Wikidata rather than from a place record, because places this atlas refuses to draw are never built as records, which is why the first attempt found 62 of these games instead of 156. A work with a real pin never lists its unmappable settings, so The Witcher 3 shows its invented ones and a game set in both Paris and Nilfgaard shows only Paris. And 3,179 famous games still have no page here, because Wikidata records no setting for them at all, which for Pong and Tetris is the correct answer.

The real places anime were drawn from, which needed the Japanese Wikipedia to find

2026-08-05T12:00:00Z

Wikidata records the setting of Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Your Name and Ponyo as the whole of Japan and nothing finer, so this atlas could only ever give them a country dot, and it had never heard of Grave of the Fireflies, Cowboy Bebop, Suzume or Madoka Magica at all.

There is now a fourth kind of evidence, anime only, and it is the weakest claim this site makes about a place: the real place a drawn work was modelled on. Nobody filmed there and the story does not happen there. Somebody drew it from there. 153 of those pairings now sit on 77 anime and the medium went from 132 titles here to 185. Yakushima and the Shiratani Unsui gorge are under Princess Mononoke, Hida Furukawa station under Your Name, Tomonoura under Ponyo, Shinjuku Gyoen under The Garden of Words, Shukugawa park and Nishinomiya station under Grave of the Fireflies, Ogaki under A Silent Voice, Chichibu under Anohana, the abandoned Washuzan Highland park under Suzume, and Pfalzgrafenstein castle in the middle of the Rhine under Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro. It is labelled as its own thing everywhere it appears and never called a filming location or a setting, and it carries no quoted sentence: the source is Japanese, so quoting it would be checkable and unreadable and translating it would break the rule that nothing here is paraphrased. The evidence is the link to the Japanese article instead.

Why Japanese, since that is the odd part. English was tried first and measured before anything was built. Over every anime article already on disk it produced nine pairings, five of which were animation studios and games publishers read out of an infobox field, which is the exact mistake the rule about drawn productions exists to prevent. Three were real. Checked directly, the English article for Spirited Away is 117,231 characters long and never mentions Dogo Onsen, and the one for Your Name never mentions the Suga shrine. The Japanese articles carry all of it, because the pilgrimage to the real staircase is a Japanese hobby written up in Japanese.

The first version of this shipped four times smaller and the reason is worth writing down, because it was circular. It read the anime this atlas already held, which is to say the ones that already had a place, so a famous anime with no setting on Wikidata was never looked at by the one thing built to find places for anime that have none. 865 anime clear this atlas bar on Wikidata and 132 were here, so 734 were invisible to it. Asking Wikidata for the corpus instead of asking ourselves took it from 30 anime to 104, and 71 of them are titles no location query on this site had ever reached.

Reading Japanese needed four guards and each was found by reading results rather than by a test. 74 candidates were thrown away for stating the claim backwards, which is a real place modelled on the work rather than the other way round, and is how a theme park area built to look like Totoro nearly became the place Totoro was drawn from. 21 were thrown away for denying the claim outright, which in Japanese is the last word of the sentence rather than the first, and is what saved the town in Your Name from being placed on a real one the article explicitly says it is not. Four were historical events that carry coordinates, which is how a putsch reached Fullmetal Alchemist. Studios are refused, because a studio is where a drawn work was made and never what its setting was modelled on.

Still wrong or missing. The country dot stays where Wikidata records one, because being set in Japan and being drawn from Yakushima are two different true statements and dropping the sourced one for the weaker one would be a bad trade. Most anime still gain nothing, because most Japanese articles simply do not say. My Neighbor Totoro sits on a national route rather than on the neighbourhood that route runs through, which is the right area reached through the wrong entity. Some claims are looser than a pin suggests: Madoka Magica is here on a sentence saying its buildings were modelled on real ones in Dubai, America and Europe, which is true and is not really a place. And FilmGuessr never asks about any of these, on purpose: the game asks where something was filmed or set, and this is neither.

FilmGuessr has its own card now, so a shared score stops showing a picture of the map

2026-08-05T12:00:00Z

Finishing a day gives you a row of coloured squares and a link, and until today the preview drawn under that link was the atlas card: a world map, the word FilmMap, and nothing at all to say a game had been played. Anyone reading the share had no way to tell what it was. The game has its own card now, carrying its own question, the five colours the share grid actually uses, and the address of the game rather than of the site. The link in the share text gained its scheme in the same change, which is eight ugly characters that buy a working link: Bluesky and Mastodon turn a bare thefilmmap.com into one by themselves, while Lemmy, Discord and most forums leave it as dead text, and dead text means nobody clicks and the card is never drawn at all.

Two faults turned up while wiring it in and both had been there since the game shipped. The page was serving the atlas’s social description and the atlas’s image caption, because the two replacements meant to swap them looked for the tag written on one line while the file writes it across three, so they matched nothing and said nothing. Every other kind of page was checked and none of them shares the fault.

And the page is finally titled for the game it became. It shipped as a Wordle, was renamed to a daily filming location guessing game, and is now a GeoGuessr: five rounds, one click each, anywhere on Earth. The title says that, because a phrase nobody searches for is worth nothing on a page whose visitors mostly arrive by searching. What a browser sees with JavaScript switched off says how the scoring works as well: 100 km out is worth 4,676 points and 5,000 km is worth 175, a production shot in nine countries is scored against the nearest of them, and anything inside 2 km counts as landing on it.

Still wrong or missing.

The card prints the atlas total of 13,259 locations rather than the 1,716 productions the game can actually ask about, because the bar deciding that pool is already written out twice and a third copy inside the image renderer is exactly how the three would drift apart.

The map can finally tell you what happened at a place, in Wikipedia’s own words

2026-08-05T12:00:00Z

Alban asked the question this atlas had never been able to answer: what happened in Finse for Star Wars, and that the map of Grand Theft Auto IV was New York. A pin is a coordinate and a pairing, and a pairing says a production was somewhere, never what it did there. 19,324 pairings on this site now carry one sentence taken word for word from the production’s own English Wikipedia article, in quotation marks, linked to the article it came from. Both of his examples are answered. The glacier by Finse reads “The first shooting location was the Hardangerjøkulen glacier near Finse, Norway, representing the planet Hoth,” and Liberty City reads “Set in the fictional Liberty City, based on New York City.” Skyfall’s page went from a grid of forty photographs to a page that says Bond’s family home was a plywood and plaster model built on Hankley Common, that Ascot Racecourse stood in for Shanghai airport, and that the Macau casino was a sound stage at Pinewood with 300 floating lanterns.

Nothing here is written by this site. The sentences are Wikipedia’s, cut at their full stops and never edited, which is the only reason they can be checked in one click, and about four fifths of pairings still carry none because no sentence in the article named the place in a way that could be quoted honestly. A quote is description and never evidence: it is attached only to a place this atlas already holds for that production, from either kind of evidence, and it cannot put a dot on the map or keep one there.

Where they appear: every filming location on a production’s page and every production on a place’s page, uncapped, six on a card you have clicked on the map, three in the production panel, and they now fill the rows of the famous scenes ranking that the 78 hand written notes never reached. The hand written ones still win wherever both exist, because a person read those against both articles and recorded the exact revision.

Four extraction mistakes were found and fixed before any of it shipped, each one caught by reading the first batch rather than by a test. Wikipedia writes a citation immediately after a full stop, so a sentence boundary that looks for a space ran straight through it and quoted two sentences as one. Removing a template that carried words left a hole, turning a facade nearly 60 ft in length into a facade nearly in length, so only citation and spacing templates are removed now and a sentence with any other hole in it is thrown away.

A place can be denied after it is named rather than before, as in Puerto Rico was seriously considered, until Spielberg settled on Kauai, which would have hung a sentence about not filming somewhere under a pin saying they did. And half the harvested sentences named people, studios as companies and awards rather than places, so a target now has to have coordinates on Wikidata to be quotable at all.

Still wrong or missing. A quote sometimes exposes a weak pin rather than describing a good one: Skyfall’s Duntrune Castle carries the sentence saying the finale was planned there and moved to Glencoe, which is true, and the pin behind it is the thing that should go. Those pins come from Wikipedia prose and their rules were deliberately left alone in this change, because tightening them moves dots that are already published and that deserves its own pass.

Drawn productions get no sentence at all, on purpose, since nothing is filmed in an animated film. And the quotes are the one thing on this site that is not public domain: Wikipedia’s licence asks for attribution and sharing alike, so they are quoted and attributed wherever they appear and they are deliberately kept out of the open data downloads, which are offered with no conditions at all.

Black buttons, the game called by its name, and one row of links off the map

2026-08-05T12:00:00Z

Three things Alban asked for in one sitting. The four controls under the search box are black now instead of gold. They are the same four buttons in the same place with the same press, but gold is the colour this whole site is lit with, so four solid gold pills were the loudest thing on the page and were competing with the category colours on the map itself. Black gets out of the way and lets the dots be the colour. The play button is called FilmGuessr, which is the game’s name everywhere else on the site and had been since the game shipped: the tab title, the sharing card and every prerendered footer said FilmGuessr while the button that opens it said Play, which told a visitor nothing about what was behind it. And the row of five links along the bottom of the map is gone. It sat over the map competing with the basemap credit for the same strip of screen, and it repeated links the panel above it already carries. It described itself in the code as the only crawl path into the guide that survives the map loading, which was the reason to keep it and was not true: those links live in the homepage’s no script block and in its structured data, both of which a search engine reads and neither of which the map can erase, and the sitemap carries all nineteen thousand pages anyway.

FilmGuessr went black on its first finished day, and endless is now a door you can just open

2026-08-04T12:00:00Z

Alban finished the five rounds and the page turned black, hours after the new game shipped. The cause was the game before it. The Wordle this replaced kept its statistics under the same name, in a shape that had no best score field, and the new summary read that field off whatever was stored and called a method on it. On a browser that had played the old game there was nothing there, the call threw, and a React page that throws while drawing unmounts everything it drew, which on a night coloured page is a black rectangle with no words on it. It never showed in testing because testing started from an empty browser, and the one player guaranteed not to have an empty browser was the person the old game was built for.

Three repairs. Stored statistics now pass through a gate that coerces every number and drops what it does not recognise, so any shape a past or future version leaves behind is readable, and history is kept: a streak earned under the old rules survives into the new ones. The game is wrapped in a net that catches a drawing crash and says so, with a reload button, because the finished rounds are saved on the device and reloading really does pick the day back up; a black screen made that promise invisible. And endless stopped being locked behind a finished day, which Alban asked for in the same breath: there is a Daily and Endless switch on the card now, usable at any time in either direction. The daily keeps its own state while you are away, the endless session keeps its running total until the tab closes, and returning to a question whose answer you already saw deals a fresh production instead of asking it again.

Still wrong or missing. The endless total lives only in the open tab, so closing it starts the count at zero. A best score earned today, on a device that had already finished the old daily this morning, reads as zero until tomorrow, because the day was already marked recorded when the new game arrived. And the old game’s saved board is deleted rather than converted, because five one click rounds cannot be honestly read out of six right or wrong taps.

The game is now FilmGuessr: five films a day, one click each, and the whole Earth to click on

2026-08-04T12:00:00Z

Alban asked for a GeoGuessr instead of a Wordle, and the game at /guess/ is one. It is called FilmGuessr now. Five productions a day rather than one, a single click each rather than six tries, and a score out of 5,000 a round on how close you landed to where it was really shot.

25,000 is a perfect day. The reveal draws a line from your click to the nearest real place and frames both ends, so you see how far out you were rather than reading it.

Two rules died with the old format and both are worth naming. A guess used to have to land ON a dot the atlas already carried, which quietly made it a multiple choice question: you were picking among places that were already filming locations, and a click on open sea did nothing at all. Any point on Earth is now an answer you can give. And a round used to be won or lost; there is no winning any more, only a distance, which is the honest thing for a question whose answer is a coordinate.

Scoring is GeoGuessr’s own curve, five thousand times e to the minus ten d over the width of a hemisphere, which reads 100 km for 4,676 points, 500 km for 3,576, 1,000 km for 2,557 and 5,000 km for 175. The reason it is a curve and not a ruler is that right city and right country feel worlds apart and are 200 km apart, while wrong continent and very wrong continent feel the same and differ by thousands.

Three things were kept deliberately. The two kilometre band still counts as spot on, because Wikidata records Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade as shot in Venice the city while this atlas separately holds St Mark’s Basilica and campo San Barnaba, and a player who finds Venice has found it. A production with several locations is still scored against the nearest of them, because Game of Thrones was shot in nine countries and marking eight of them wrong would be a lie about the data. And the faint dots are still on the board, because they are what the game is made of when the tile server is slow: they come from data the site has already sent, so a bad network costs you the coastline and not the game.

Still wrong or missing. Those dots do make it easier, since the answer is always on one of them, and that is a trade taken with open eyes over an empty screen. A day in progress remembers your finished rounds but not a reveal you were looking at when you closed the tab, so a reload puts you on the next production. Yesterday’s saved boards are abandoned rather than converted, because a six guess board cannot be read as five one click rounds and a half read one would hand somebody a score they never earned. And the pool is still famous productions only, 1,716 of them, so the long tail of the atlas never comes up.

A work list of the films Wikidata cannot place, and a false claim it caught this atlas making

2026-08-04T12:00:00Z

The Wikidata Weekly Summary made this atlas its Tool of the Week today, which puts it in front of several thousand people who can fix data rather than only report it, and the page those people needed did not exist.

There is a page here saying how to record a filming location, and it never said which ones were worth recording; the answer was look around the map and see. There is now a work list at /gaps/. 3,253 productions here have no dot on the map because Wikidata records nothing precise enough to place them, and they are split by what the edit actually is. 1,673 are the easy ones: the English Wikipedia article names a place in a Filming or Production section, Wikidata holds no filming location this atlas can use, and the fact is already written down and usually already cited, so recording it as a statement takes about a minute. Parasite, Shutter Island, Battleship Potemkin and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban are all in that state. The other 1,580 do have a statement and it is a whole country or state: Casablanca is California, Gladiator is Malta and Morocco, Apocalypse Now is the Philippines. Refining one of those means finding where inside the country the crew actually worked and citing it, which is research rather than transcription. Both lists run most widely known first, every row carries the Wikidata item to edit and the sentence to check it against, and 150 of each are shown.

Building the page caught this atlas making a false claim of its own, the same one the anime rule was written to stop. Nothing is filmed in an animated film, and this pipeline has known that about anime since the day Spirited Away was found sitting on Dōgo Onsen; Western animation was never covered by that rule, because a Disney feature is recorded as an animated film and not as anime, so it arrived as an ordinary film and was read for filming locations like one. 45 drawn productions were presenting places from their Wikipedia articles as places a camera stood. Aladdin claimed the San Francisco Zoo, Beauty and the Beast claimed London, The Emperor’s New Groove claimed Machu Picchu, Peter Pan the Bonavista Peninsula, and the 1992 Aladdin also claimed Longcross Studios, where the 2019 remake was shot, a different film entirely. All of it is gone, from the map, the pages, the cards, the downloads and the API. Dropped rather than relabelled, because no honest label exists: those places are the studio a film was drawn in, the real place its art was modelled on, or another production’s location that the article happens to mention, and the only move that adds no new claim is removing the wrong one.

The line that mattered most in the fix is the one that kept things. A film that mixes live action with animation really was shot somewhere, so Who Framed Roger Rabbit keeps Elstree, Enchanted keeps Times Square and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 keeps Vancouver; 41 of those were identified and left alone, and the first version of the rule would have deleted them.

Two smaller repairs went out with it. 1,281 pages read that the article’s article names some places, a label falling back to the word article inside a sentence already saying it, and each now names the section when there is one and says the article when there is not. And the first version of the work list itself filed 884 productions that do carry a country level statement under a heading reading Wikidata holds no statement at all, because it split the lists by which evidence this atlas happened to be showing rather than by what Wikidata actually holds; caught by checking all 300 listed rows against live statement counts before anything shipped.

Still wrong or missing. Only 150 rows of each list are shown and the rest are in the open data. Two of the 150 in the first section do hold a statement, pointing at an item carrying no coordinates, which is why that section says no filming location this atlas can use rather than no statement. And the animation test reads Wikidata’s classes and genres, so a drawn production that Wikidata files under neither is still being read as an ordinary film.

Every dot shows a photograph now, or nothing, and never a locator map

2026-08-04T12:00:00Z

Alban noticed that some places opened their card with a map instead of a picture, and guessed it was countries. It was mostly countries. Wikidata’s image for a country is very often a grey outline locator map, so the United States, Spain, Canada, India, Iran, Kenya, Saudi Arabia and seventeen more were illustrated with a diagram of their own borders. 62 places on the atlas were showing something that is not a photograph: those maps, a row of military bases displaying their unit insignia, a few towns displaying a civic logo, an airport showing its FAA taxi diagram, and Křivoklát Castle showing a medieval coat of arms while its own photograph sat unused in the next row of the same record.

There are now none. A picture has to look like a photograph to be used: never a drawing file, and never a filename that announces itself as a map, a seal, a flag or a logo. Where the record holds another picture, the real one is taken instead, so the United States shows the Statue of Liberty, India the Taj Mahal, Saudi Arabia the Kaaba, Panama its canal, and Křivoklát the castle. 129 of the 133 country dots now carry a photograph. Where there is nothing else, the card shows no picture at all, which is 29 places, because an empty frame is more honest than a map of the place you asked to see.

The rule is careful about one thing in particular: a word only counts against a picture when the place is not called that. Seal Beach and Seal Rocks keep their photographs, which an unguarded rule threw away on the first attempt.

Still wrong or missing. It reads filenames, not pictures, so a photograph with an unlucky name can still be dropped and a map with an innocent one can still slip through. British Empire, the Ming dynasty, Louisiana and Romsdal have no photograph left because the only picture recorded for each of them is a map.

Wider pages, buttons you can press, and every scene now says where else to go

2026-08-03T12:00:00Z

Housekeeping, all of it Alban’s. The four controls under the search box are solid gold buttons now instead of outlined chips, with no icons on them, which is the shape the sister atlases have used since they launched. About stopped being a panel that slid open and became a link to the About page, because the page already said everything the panel did and more, and one answer that stays current beats two that drift apart. The pages are wider, and the wordmark now sits hard against the left edge of the window with the navigation against the right, rather than both being penned into a column down the middle of the screen.

And every row of the famous scenes ranking gained the two things the atlas knew but was not saying: where else that production shot, and what else was shot at that place. The Silence of the Lambs now reads that it was also shot at Pittsburgh, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and four more, and that one other production used the airport. Doctor Who says London, Cape Town and twelve more, and that it is part of the Doctor Who franchise. Statement places only in that line, never the ones read out of Wikipedia prose, because the ranking is built from statements and says so five times over further up the page. The About page also counts to three now rather than two, since a third kind of evidence arrived earlier today.

Two fixes followed the same afternoon. In light mode those new buttons were coming out dark brown with cream text, the exact opposite of a yellow button, because the colour tokens they used are redefined for the light theme and the whole pill inverted. The yellow is now pinned in both themes and only the label follows: black on light, white on dark. And the guessing game had been built for a phone and left alone on a desktop, where it was one small card in the top left corner of an empty window. It now keeps a round marker and a way back to the map in the far corner, the card has a real width, six pips show how many tries are left without counting rows, and the collapse control is gone on a desktop because there is nothing there to reclaim. On a phone the finished card scrolls inside itself rather than running off the bottom of the screen, and the row of links along the bottom no longer wraps into the map controls.

A daily game: here is a film, tap where it was shot

2026-08-03T12:00:00Z

There is a game at /guess/ now. It names one film, series, video game or anime a day and you tap the place on the world map where you think it was shot, six tries, and every miss tells you how many kilometres off you were and which way to go. 1,713 productions are in the pool, so nothing repeats for years, and it is the same four media the atlas carries: Great Pretender and Iroduku alongside Assassin’s Creed II in Florence, God of War in Athens and Evangelion at Mount Ashigara. The board is every one of the 13,241 places on this atlas, drawn as anonymous dots, and it carries no place names at all, because a labelled map would print the answer beside the dot.

Three things about it are worth saying plainly. Any of a production’s recorded places counts, because Game of Thrones was shot in nine countries and marking eight of them wrong would be a lie about the data. Landing within two kilometres counts too, and that rule exists because the first round played caught it out: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is recorded as shot in Venice, the city, while this atlas separately holds St Mark’s Basilica, the Venetian Ghetto and campo San Barnaba, so five taps in the right city read one kilometre and wrong. And only Wikidata statements are ever the answer, never the places read out of Wikipedia prose, because a game that marks you right or wrong is making a firmer claim than that evidence can carry.

It also runs when the map tiles do not: the dots are drawn from data this site already sent you, so a slow tile server costs you the coastline and not the game. Suggested by Alban, who wanted the castle game his other atlas has.

Still wrong or missing. The pool is famous productions only, so the long tail of the atlas never comes up, and a place with no Wikidata statement can never be an answer however well Wikipedia knows it.

Anime nearly doubles, an episode counts as its series, and Grand Theft Auto turns out to have been missing all along

2026-08-03T12:00:00Z

Alban asked whether more anime scenes could be found without lowering the standard the map is held to. Four answers, and the third one was a hole in the atlas that had nothing to do with anime. Anime goes from 78 to 143 and from 52 places to 185. Some of that is the bar: getting in used to take 16 language editions on Wikipedia, scaled from the film bar, and it is now 10, the same number video games answer to, because an anime and a game are placed the same way and there was no good reason for two numbers. That band brings Great Pretender with Singapore, Nice, Los Angeles and London, Night Is Short Walk On Girl with Kyoto, Iroduku with Nagasaki, Her Blue Sky with Chichibu, Waiting in the Summer with Komoro Castle and the Nishiura dam, The Aquatope on White Sand with Nanjō, Anne no Nikki with Amsterdam and Muteking with San Francisco.

Second, an episode now counts as its series. This atlas has folded episodes into their series since the day it read a filming statement at all, which is why Dubrovnik shows under Game of Thrones and not under the episode that carries it, but settings were never folded the same way, so every narrative location written on an anime episode was invisible. Nadia was one work carrying nineteen of them, and now shows the Kermadec Trench, Le Maire Strait, Cape Verde, Tartessos and the English Channel alongside its Paris. Yu Gi Oh Duel Monsters arrives with Death Valley, Sydney, San Francisco, Florida and London, Zombie Land Saga with Saga, Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex with Tokyo, Sailor Moon with Sendai.

Third, the thing that was not about anime. A work whose setting is a place that does not exist was thrown away before the part of this pipeline built to handle it ever ran. That part exists and works: it asks Wikidata what the invented place is based on, keeps the invented name on the pin, and says on the card which real place lent the coordinates. Only eleven pins had ever survived to use it, because the query in front of it demanded that a setting have coordinates of its own. So Grand Theft Auto was not on this map. Not one of them. Liberty City now stands on New York, Los Santos and San Fierro and Las Venturas on Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas, Vice City on Miami, and Mafia III, Far Cry 6, Postal, Yakuza 0, Katawa Shoujo and six Pokémon regions arrive with them, 29 games in all and 18 new invented places.

Fourth, and this is the weakest thing on the atlas, 19 anime are now placed by the book they adapt. Wikidata records no setting at all for them and records one for their source, so Anne of Green Gables gets Green Gables, Gankutsuou gets the Château d’If and Marseille, Les Misérables Shōjo Cosette gets Montfermeil and Digne les Bains, Trapp Family Story gets Salzburg, The Three Musketeers gets La Rochelle and Meung sur Loire, and The Wonderful Adventures of Nils gets 71 places across Sweden, which is the whole of the flight in the novel. Every one of those rows says per its source work, on the card, the page, the downloads and the API, and the reason the label is not optional is in the next paragraph.

Still wrong or missing. An adaptation is free to move its story and this route cannot tell when it has: Gankutsuou retells its novel in the year 5053 and largely in space, and Romeo × Juliet happens in a floating city called Neo Verona, and both take the book’s pins anyway. That is why they are labelled rather than hidden, and it is a fair reason to distrust those 130 links in particular. 36 anime still sit on a country dot, because Wikidata records Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Your Name and The Boy and the Heron as set in the whole of Japan and nothing finer exists to read. Four have no pin at all. The real world places an anime was modelled on, which is what most people mean by an anime pilgrimage, are still a different claim and this atlas still does not make it.

The Han River is in Seoul, the quotes point at the sentence they copied, and the map arrives sooner

2026-08-03T12:00:00Z

An audit of all 13,128 places, the 150 famous scenes and the 78 quoted sentences, and then the three things it found. First, the country under a pin. Wikidata records more than one country for anything that crosses a border, and this atlas took whichever answer came back first. That is fine for the Sahara and wrong for the Han River, which flows through Seoul and was labelled North Korea on every page that named it. Where there is a choice the winner is now the country whose border actually contains the pin: 514 places name more than one and 176 changed. The Rocky Mountains are in the United States, Iguaçu Falls in Argentina, Istria in Croatia, the Gobi in Mongolia, the Himalayas in Nepal, Pangong Tso in India, the Dead Sea in Jordan.

Second, the quotes. Every sentence under a scene on the ranking is Wikipedia word for word, and the point of quoting rather than paraphrasing is that a reader can check it, but the link went to the live article, which is the one thing certain to drift away from the words in the quotation marks. Each of the 77 now links the exact revision it was copied from, so what you check is what was copied.

Third, speed. The photograph and the article name were 38 percent of the file the map downloads before it can draw anything, and the map draws neither: a dot is a colour and a place, and a photograph is only ever read when you open a card. They now arrive in a second file, after the dots. The wait before the first dot fell from 802 kB to 595.

Still wrong or missing. Seven places exist twice on this map because Wikidata holds two items for them, and they are not merged: two of those pairs are a demolished building and the one built on the site, which really are two things, and Elstree Studios is an umbrella item and one of the studios under it, holding 13 productions and 35. The busier dot now draws on top of the quieter one so the pair reads as a single pin, which is a fix for the map and not for the data. 1,223 pins sit just outside the border they belong to because the border map used for checking is a coarse one, and that is a limit of the check rather than of the pin.

Anime joins the atlas, a busy place finally looks busy, and Spirited Away stops claiming a hot spring

2026-08-03T12:00:00Z

Three things. Anime is here, 78 of them, in the same shape the video games are in and for the same reason: an anime is drawn, so no camera ever stood anywhere, and its pins are where the story is set rather than where anything was shot. They live at /anime/, they say set in everywhere they appear, and they have their own row in the layers panel. The bar for getting in is 16 language editions on Wikipedia, which is not a taste: the most covered film here has 168 and the most covered anime has 109, so the film bar of 25 scales to about 16. What arrives with them is Shinjuku Gyoen from The Garden of Words, Ōarai from Girls und Panzer, Hakone Yumoto Station and Mount Ashigara from Evangelion, Tama New Town from Pom Poko, the Kushiro wetlands from When Marnie Was There, Mount Zaō and Takase Station from Only Yesterday, and Milan from Porco Rosso.

Adding anime also corrected something that was already wrong. Anime films were arriving as ordinary films, so yesterday this atlas showed Spirited Away at Dōgo Onsen, the hot spring its bathhouse was modelled on, filed under filming locations. Nothing was ever filmed there, and the same mistake had put Arrietty in Los Angeles. Both are gone. The cause was two rules that were each correct alone: a work is read as a film if Wikipedia covers it widely, and a game is read as a setting because only this site knows it is a game. An anime is both, and the film rule was winning.

Second, the dots now have sizes. Every dot used to be the same, so a city holding 319 productions and a lane holding one made the same mark, and the busiest places on the atlas were invisible on it. A dot now grows with how much was made there, on a log scale because three quarters of the 13,128 places hold exactly one production and Los Angeles holds 822, and busy places draw on top of quiet ones so a city is no longer hidden underneath its own studios. Nothing is ever hidden by size: the smallest dot is still a dot, which is the difference between this and the reveal tiers this map used to have and will not have again. Suggested by Tigeroovy on Lemmy, who pointed at Vancouver.

Third, the address for corrections is now ceoflightmussy@gmail.com.

Still wrong or missing. The famous anime are the vaguest: Wikidata records Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Your Name and The Boy and the Heron as set in the whole of Japan, so 21 of the 78 sit on a dot in the middle of the country, which stands in for the area and is not a place anyone can visit. The real world places an anime was modelled on, which is what most people mean by an anime pilgrimage, are a different claim and this atlas does not make it anywhere.

Two pins this page called wrong are gone, and there is now a page for adding the ones that are missing

2026-08-03T12:00:00Z

The entry below named two places this map had no business showing and then left them on it. Frostpunk sat on Krakatoa and Stronghold sat on the Iberian Peninsula, and both came from one mistake worth naming, because it is the risk that comes with reading prose at all: a sentence says where a game is set, the sentence moves on to something else, and the link that follows gets read as the setting anyway. Frostpunk is set in an alternate 1886 when the eruptions of Krakatoa trigger a volcanic winter, so the volcano is what ended that world rather than a place the game happens in. Stronghold’s campaign map changes with the language you play it in, so a line about the Spanish edition put it on the Iberian Peninsula.

Two narrow guards now catch that exact shape: a cue left with no object where a place belongs, and a link that completes the name of a natural disaster. Between them they remove five links from the whole atlas, two of which were pins anyone could see, and nothing else moved. The first attempt was far wider, treating any subordinate clause as the end of a setting, and it deleted Tsushima Island from Ghost of Tsushima, Rome from Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood and eight of Battlefield 3’s nine maps, every one of them right. It was thrown away rather than trimmed, because it is simply not true that a subordinate clause ends a setting.

The same rebuild finished a job this week had started: two expansions added productions faster than their articles could be read, so 1,319 of those articles were read now, the atlas grew from 12,583 places to 13,112, and the productions with no pin at all fell from 810 to 694. 5,158 productions now rest on Wikipedia evidence across 19,990 links, labelled and kept apart from the statements exactly as before. There is also a page at last for the far commoner problem, which is a place this atlas simply does not have: how to add a filming location statement to Wikidata in about a minute, what makes one survive, and where to send a correction you would rather hand over. It is linked from the map panel, the footer and the top of this page. vithigar on Lemmy asked for it, and was right that this site could say five times over that a correction belongs upstream without once saying how to make one.

Still wrong or missing. Only English Wikipedia is read. A place an article names in passing can still slip these guards, which is why the label on every prose pin says which article and section it came from. 694 productions have no pin at all and 832 games still sit on a country dot, because nothing finer is written down anywhere this atlas can read.

A country was often all this atlas had, so it went looking for the town

2026-08-02T12:00:00Z

27% of the filming statements this atlas reads point at a whole country or a state, and 52% of every video game setting does. That is why 1,206 productions had no pin at all and 860 of the 1,342 games sat on a dot in the middle of a country. Two changes, both inside the labelled Wikipedia stream added this morning: 396 of those productions now have real places, the map grew from 10,417 places to 12,583, and 30 games left their country dot behind. First, the parser stopped needing a heading that says Filming. Of the 640 pinless productions that have an English article, only 62 had such a heading, while most kept their locations in a plain Production section, so outside a Filming heading a link now counts when its own sentence says where a camera stood. Troy was four country names and is now Mellieħa, Comino and Cabo San Lucas. Out of Africa was the word Kenya and is now Karen, Lang’ata and the Ngong Hills. Tokyo Story was the word Japan and is now Chiyoda, Adachi, Chūō, Taitō, Kamakura, Atami and Osaka. The Grapes of Wrath is Oklahoma City, McAlester, Bridgeport and Sayre. The Green Mile is Shelbyville and the old Formosa lot.

Second, video games are read the same way, with set in as the cue instead of filmed in, because a game is filmed nowhere. Battlefield 3 carried five country dots and now carries Tehran, Kuwait City, Sulaymaniyah and New York. Bloodlines was a dot in the middle of the United States and is now Santa Monica, Hollywood, Downtown and Chinatown. Assassin’s Creed Unity was a dot in France and is now the Île de la Cité, the Marais, the Latin Quarter and Versailles. Metro 2033 is Moscow, Ghost of Tsushima is Tsushima Island, Infamous: Second Son is Seattle. When a game finds a real place its country dot disappears, because that dot was only ever a fallback for knowing nothing finer. The label had to change with it: of the 4,764 productions carrying this kind of evidence only 1,603 got it from a Filming section, 1,337 came from Production and 1,219 from more than one section at once, so every card, page, download and API answer now names the section a claim really came from, or says article when no single one is true.

Still wrong or missing. Only English Wikipedia is read. A place named in a sentence for some other reason can still slip the guard, which is exactly why the label is there: Frostpunk is set in a frozen 1886 and shows Krakatoa, because the eruption is named in the same sentence, and Stronghold shows the Iberian Peninsula on the strength of a line about its Spanish translation. 810 productions still have no pin and 830 games still sit on a country, because nothing finer is written down anywhere this atlas can read. Suggested by mushroommunk on Lemmy, whose point that the sections are richer than the statements turned out to be truer of the whole article than of the sections.

A Bond film says it is a Bond film

2026-08-02T12:00:00Z

Skyfall knew its year and its places and nothing about the twenty six other films it belongs with. Every production that is part of a series or franchise now says so, on its page and on the map panel, and the line links a new kind of page: one per series, 481 of them, gathering every member in order and every place they used, deduplicated, with the two kinds of evidence kept apart exactly as they are everywhere else on this atlas. The James Bond series carries 27 productions here, the Marvel Cinematic Universe 46, the Wizarding World 21. Membership is not this site’s opinion: it is Wikidata’s part of the series and media franchise statements, class checked so that only film, television and game series qualify, which is why Game of Thrones does not claim to belong to A Song of Ice and Fire on a page about filming. A series with a single member on the atlas gets the line and no page, and a series Wikidata has not recorded stays invisible, which has the usual fix: add the statement upstream and this site follows on the next rebuild.

Wikipedia is read at last, and every claim says which source it rests on

2026-08-02T12:00:00Z

Two days ago the entry below this one said reading filming locations out of Wikipedia prose was considered and not done, because a pin here is a statement you can check in one click. It is done now, in the shape that entry demanded: nothing is mixed. The atlas read the Filming section of 3,155 English Wikipedia articles and found 12,866 places for 2,593 productions that no Wikidata statement carries, among them 6,087 places this map had never seen. Every one is labelled per Wikipedia on the card, the page, the downloads and the MCP endpoint, and links the exact section it came from, because a sentence in an article is weaker evidence than a statement, and pretending otherwise would cost this atlas the one thing it has.

What it buys is the difference between an outline and an answer. Gladiator goes from two countries to Ouarzazate, Bourne Wood and the Val d’Orcia. Lawrence of Arabia goes from one London pin to Almería, Ouarzazate, Petra and the Plaza de España. Casablanca gains the Van Nuys Airport that played its runway. Transformers: The Last Knight, which carries not one Wikidata statement, appears with nineteen places, down to Alnwick Castle and Michigan Central Station. Suggested by mushroommunk on Lemmy, who was right that the sections are richer than the statements.

A guard drops places a shoot only nearly happened at or merely pretended to show, like the Toronto that The Terminator planned and left for Los Angeles; it removed 1,153 links, and Aatube on Lemmy supplied the counterexamples it was built against. Silent Hill now shows the Brantford a commenter lived in while it was shot, who asked to stay uncredited. Public Enemies gains its Wisconsin towns down to the Little Bohemia Lodge, raised by Zorque. Batman v Superman gains the East Lansing art museum ThePantser pointed to. Peter Pan & Wendy gains the Bonavista Peninsula vithigar asked about.

Still wrong or missing: only English Wikipedia is read, a place an article mentions in passing can slip the guard, The Shipping News has no Filming section to read, and The Grand Seduction sits below every fame bar. The labels exist because mistakes of this kind are possible; say so when you find one.

Hong Kong is listed as Hong Kong

2026-07-31T12:00:00Z

Every place in Hong Kong was filed under China, because that is the country Wikidata records for them. It is correct about sovereignty and unhelpful on a film map: Hong Kong is the ninth busiest location on this atlas at 112 productions, it has its own ISO code, and its cinema is a body of work nobody looks for under China. It now reports as Hong Kong, and so does Macau. This is the one place the atlas knowingly prints something other than what the country field says, and it is a labelling choice and nothing more.

Considered, and not done: filming locations read from Wikipedia

2026-07-31T12:00:00Z

Several people on Lemmy pointed out that Wikipedia articles carry far more detail than Wikidata does, in tidy Filming sections, and they are right. It was built and measured: 38 percent of productions here have such a section, and a sample of 120 of them turned up 151 places this map does not have, including the Brantford that somebody specifically asked for. It has not been added, and will not be without a rethink, because every pin on this site is a single Wikidata filming location statement you can check in one click, and a place taken from prose is a weaker kind of evidence. Mixing the two quietly would cost the only thing this atlas has that the bigger ones do not. If it ever arrives it will say, pin by pin, which kind of evidence it rests on.

A second door in, for cinema the world writes less about

2026-07-31T12:00:00Z

dual_sport_dork on Lemmy pointed out that Bollywood was barely on the map, and they were right. Productions got in by how many Wikipedia language editions cover them, which is a fair measure of fame and an unfair measure of where the fame is: a mid tier American film clears the bar easily, a film that is enormous in Korea or Italy often does not. A production now also gets in if it is among the top 300 of its own country of origin. That admitted 2,094 more productions, took Mumbai from 8 titles to 23 and India from 11 places to 33, and brought in national classics the old rule could never reach, like the first Indonesian feature and a 1917 Mexican silent. It is not the whole answer to that complaint: Wikidata records no filming location at all for most Indian films, even the famous ones, and no threshold here can invent one.

Invented places, put on the real ones behind them

2026-07-31T12:00:00Z

A video game is filmed nowhere, so Wikidata places it by where its story happens, and sometimes that place does not exist. Where Wikidata also records what the invented place is based on, or which real place it sits inside, the pin now goes there and says so on its face: Kamurochō on Kabukichō, Sōtenbori on Dōtonbori, Libertatia on Antongil Bay. Nine of them so far. This is the only two step claim on the atlas, which is why those pins carry the invented name, name the real place they borrow their coordinates from, and sit in a layer you can switch off.

Every country has a photograph now

2026-07-31T12:00:00Z

The country pins had no pictures, and the reason turned out to be specific: a country almost never carries a photograph on Wikidata, only a flag, a coat of arms and a locator map. None of those is a picture of anywhere. They now fall back to the Wikivoyage banner, which is a real photograph chosen to represent the place. Twenty three blank country pins became two, and twenty five other places gained a picture as well. Flags and locator maps are still not used: a flag is not a place.

The card shows everything now, and scrolls

2026-07-31T12:00:00Z

A pinned card used to list twelve productions, which meant the map could tell you that 620 things were shot in New York and then show you twelve of them. It now lists all of them and scrolls. The dataset was capped at sixty per place as well, so no amount of scrolling would have reached the rest; that cap is gone, at a cost of ten kilobytes.

Games set in a whole country are on the map, in their own layer

2026-07-31T12:00:00Z

Until now a game whose setting Wikidata records only as a country was dropped, on the grounds that "set in the United States" answers nothing. That was true of a page and wrong about a map, so those games are now pinned at the country, in a layer of their own that you can switch off, and the pin says plainly that it is a whole area and not a spot. A game that already has a real place does not get one, because a dot in the middle of the Czech Republic adds nothing next to twelve named Bohemian villages. Games went from 430 to 1,183.

A bug that had been quietly deleting places

2026-07-31T12:00:00Z

Every place that only a video game referenced had vanished from the atlas, with no error anywhere: the code that reads coordinates matched one spelling of the format, the two data services this site queries spell it differently, and whenever the slower one answered, the locations were silently skipped. Kingdom Come lost all twelve of its Bohemian villages that way. One character fixed it, and the places are back.

The whole atlas is downloadable, and machine readable

2026-07-31T12:00:00Z

Every filming location is now available as GeoJSON and CSV, with a second file for the productions, free and with no account. There is also a live endpoint that an AI assistant can query directly, so it can answer where something was filmed without scraping seven thousand pages. Both carry the same distinction the site does: a film was filmed somewhere, a game is set somewhere.

Pages that were competing with their own namesakes

2026-07-30T12:00:00Z

Four different films are called The Three Musketeers and two German towns are called Moosach. Their pages were distinct in every way except the line a search engine leans on hardest, so 239 pages were quietly competing with a namesake. Each now carries the year, or the description, or as a last resort its own Wikidata id.

Video games got a filter, and a map of their own

2026-07-30T12:00:00Z

The map can now be filtered to films, series or games. Games nearly doubled at the same time, and every surface that shows one repeats the same thing: a game is set there, not filmed there.

The site moved to thefilmmap.com

2026-07-28T12:00:00Z

It used to live at flight007.com, which was the wrong address for a film map in a way that only showed up in a search engine: every result for that name is an air disaster. Every old link redirects, and every page came with it.

First published

2026-07-26T12:00:00Z

An interactive map of the places films and television were actually shot, built only from filming location statements on Wikidata, with a page for every production and every place.