Movie Scene Map changelog

Every open reader report was checked today, 112 of them, against the shipped data, the cached Wikipedia article and live Wikidata.

Three readers of the X thread and one reader by mail caught the same mistake in three films, and it turned out to be the biggest accuracy problem on the atlas.

Five more editions of the site, on Alban’s instruction: French at /fr/, Portuguese at /pt/, Spanish at /es/, Polish at /pl/ and Arabic at /ar/, beside the Japanese and Korean editions of 5 September.

Every page of the atlas now exists three times over: in English at the addresses it always had, in Japanese at /ja/ and in Korean at /ko/.

The link preview card had gone generic: a headline and six coloured dots on a dark gradient, saying what the atlas is and showing none of it.

A production earned a pin by being written up in 25 Wikipedia language editions.

The Hacker News thread reached the front page overnight and finished its second day at 307 points and 40 comments, and six people wrote in by email.

The site was posted to Hacker News on 1 September and the thread found five real defects in about four hours.

Every picture on this atlas came from Wikimedia Commons at a web address beginning commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath.

A place on this map is a name, a coordinate and a photograph, and until today 1,256 of them had no photograph at all. 660 of those now do.

Share a page from this atlas on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp or Messenger and you got a link with no picture.

This atlas has a sibling, The Castle Map, built with the same tools a month earlier and through more weather since.

The section added below the map this morning made the homepage scroll, and a map page that scrolls is a nuisance.

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.

The atlas now answers near as well as in.

A filming location statement names one item and says nothing about what contains it.

Resting the cursor on a dot used to open a card that spent five lines on the place and one on the films.

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 sentence under the map read: a free interactive map of 14,525 real filming locations in 88 countries.

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.

The morning’s work put Kiki’s Delivery Service on the atlas, drawn from Visby, Stockholm, San Francisco, Lisbon, Paris and Naples.

Alban asked whether anything else was hidden the way Visby was.

Alban asked for Kronstadt, which Battlefield 1 was drawn from.

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

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.

Google shows this atlas on the first page for questions like where was Community filmed, and almost nobody clicks.

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.

Every page here carries a one line description under its title, the kind that reads "2004 anime film directed by Mamoru Oshii".

A card can carry one sentence from Wikipedia saying what actually happened at a place.

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.

Four people had said the same thing by the start of August.

Vasquez Rocks was not on this map.

Pinewood was here with 254 productions.

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.

Alban asked whether more games and manga could be placed at something more specific than a country.

Three things Alban asked for in one sitting.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

Three things Alban asked for while looking at the map.

Alban noticed that some places opened their card with a map instead of a picture, and guessed it was countries.

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.

Alban asked for a GeoGuessr instead of a Wordle, and the game at /guess/ is one.

Alban finished the five rounds and the page turned black, hours after the new game shipped.

The entry below named two places this map had no business showing and then left them on it.

Three things.

An audit of all 13,128 places, the 150 famous scenes and the 78 quoted sentences, and then the three things it found.