About Wobbly Blue Marble — data and sources

Wobbly Blue Marble is a globe you can spin, with an encyclopedia behind it: countries, mountains, rivers and wonders of the world, written for children aged roughly 8 to 12.

Where the data comes from

Coastlines and borders: Natural Earth (1:50m), simplified for drawing on a sphere.
Country data: the ISO 3166 dataset (names, capitals, areas, languages, currencies, neighbours).
Population figures: World Bank, 2018. They are deliberately written as approximations.
Mountains, rivers and wonders: researched individually and checked against public reference works.

How we handle uncertainty

Some numbers are genuinely disputed. Is the Nile or the Amazon the longest river? How tall is Mont Blanc when its ice cap changes thickness every year? In those cases we give the most commonly used figure and say in the text that it is disputed, rather than pretending there is one settled answer.

What this site is built for

A child should be able to look at something without something being demanded back. So there is no timer on any quiz, no streak that breaks if you stay away a week, no notifications and nothing that is lost by tomorrow. The collector's pass on the globe only ever counts up. If a new feature needed a countdown or a broken streak to work, it would be the wrong feature.

There is no account. The only thing counted is which pages get opened, and even that only once somebody has explicitly agreed in the banner — without a click nothing is loaded and nothing is set. What you have visited on the globe lives in your own browser's storage and never leaves your device. Clear your browser data and it is gone. The details are on the privacy page.

How the pages are made

Every page is finished HTML on disk, not a program that assembles something in your browser. There are no photographs: the globe is drawn as it loads, the outline maps and comparison bars are generated graphics, and the sharing previews are drawn when the site is built. That keeps it fast and free of licensing questions.

For grown-ups

Country pages are assembled from verified datasets. That keeps them accurate and easy to refresh, but it also makes them more factual than the hand-written mountain, river and wonder pages. If you want to add your own observations to a country page, the structure is built to take them.