Data & sources

Everything here comes from open sources that anyone can check and anyone can improve. This page lists them, the licence each is used under, and how to fix something that is wrong.

Places — OpenStreetMap

Every place in a guide, and every map, comes from OpenStreetMap, the map of the world built by volunteers. Places © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database Licence. That credit travels with anything you export — it is written into the downloads.

I keep a copy of the places a guide needs, rebuilt every week from Geofabrik's extracts, so guides load in a fraction of a second. Each guide shows the date its places were taken. Where that copy does not reach yet, places come from OpenStreetMap directly, which is slower.

Descriptions — Wikivoyage and Wikipedia

The short description of a place comes from Wikivoyage, written by travellers, or from Wikipedia where Wikivoyage has nothing. Both are used under CC BY-SA 4.0, and each description links back to its article.

Facts — Wikidata, Unicode CLDR and the IANA time zone database

A country's capital, calling code, emergency numbers, plug types, voltage and driving side, a city's population, and annual events come from Wikidata, which is public domain (CC0). Currencies and languages come from Unicode CLDR, the data behind every phone's and browser's — where I checked, Wikidata gave France the Pacific franc instead of the euro and the United States no English. Time zones come from the IANA time zone database, and each page works out the offset in force on the day you read it.

The cities with pages are the ones Wikivoyage has a full guide for — written up properly by travellers.

Entry and visas — governments' own advice

For British passports, entry rules are quoted from GOV.UK foreign travel advice under the Open Government Licence v3.0; for US passports, from the US Department of State, a public-domain work. Both are quoted as published, with the date the publisher last changed them — never paraphrased, because a paraphrase of a visa rule is how people end up stranded at a border. For other passports I point to where to check instead of guessing. Embassies and consulates come from Wikidata.

Photos — Wikimedia Commons

Photos are the images Wikidata links to each place, hosted on Wikimedia Commons. Each photo links to its page on Commons, which names the photographer and the licence.

Maps — OpenFreeMap

Getting there — flight routes

Which airports connect, flight times and airlines come from airline-route-data, a weekly snapshot of published routes. It says nothing about which days a route runs. Times for the journey to and from the airport are my estimate from distance, and are marked as such.

Search

Place search uses Photon as you type and Nominatim when you press Enter — both search OpenStreetMap. Your searches go to them from my server, not from your browser.

Something wrong or missing?

Fix it at the source and everyone benefits. A missing café, a closed museum, wrong opening hours: correct it on OpenStreetMap, and it will appear here within a week of the next rebuild. A description is edited on its Wikivoyage or Wikipedia article.