I think a more important question is whether Yemen still exists as as single coherent political entity with the same borders as seen on ANY of those maps, which given the present situation, it clearly does not.
this was posted on 27. of november 2024. on the 3rd of december someone found a correct looking number in a yemen government document which was published in 2005 and updated wikipedia. so at least the country itself was not under any illusion of being bigger than they actually are.
Ah I'm glad. That's much better than the solution I had in mind of using the sand from the desert to expand the land into the sea to add extra 100k km of land area, to hide all this embarrassment under the rug.
I remember hearing from a Yemeni American in the late 90s that the border with Saudi was not defined (mentioned in the article). I wonder if this could be explained more simply that a few sources didn't bother to update this over time due to the ambiguity, they just carried over what had been published before.
Although I do hope too that people don't lose their sense of meaning and curiosity too much, it's worth keeping in mind that this article was published in 2024 which was a very different world from now. Curiosity requires energy, and it'll be hard for a creature relying on energy for survival to justify using their own energy for some activity when there's a more energy-efficient way to reach a specific goal. But just like going to the gym makes your body healthier despite the fact that this requires energy, thinking on your own will be increasingly important for maintaining a healthy mind and the sense of self.
What I wonder is why anyone noticed this in the first place. Who saw the size of the country in Wikipedia and thought, “really? Let me trace that in Google maps, just to be sure…”
I actually measured the size of (parts of) Yemen on maps a week or two ago, trying to figure out the population density of the Houthi-controlled areas, which contain the majority (~70-80%, hard to say exactly as the population distribution has been changing rapidly in the past decade) of Yemen's population in about 1/3 of it's land.
I did not expect this to just be a simple mistake, especially one that's been around for decades. Makes you wonder what other kind of basic facts are wrong.
In the age of satellites, computers, Google maps and the like you would think a mistake like this would be impossible to persist for so long.
These kinds of issues have existed since the first human started recording what they owned, and will probably continue plaguing us until the last one dies.
A bunch of countries are suspected of undercounting their population because so many people are living "off the grid" or deliberately overcounting to get more funding. Probably some of the cases are real and some are just conspiracy theories.
Well, this is a pretty perfect usecase for AI (although it's also easy to just get shapefiles from NE and do it yourself, obviously).
Interestingly all of UAE, Yemen and Saudi Arabia have significant discrepancies between the World Factbook and their shapefiles (in every case overestimating), probably all related to not having had a demarcated border in the Rub Al Khali.
A quick lazy calculation (including adding in Antartica) the countries totals came up ~2,000,000km2 short. I don't care enough to dive deeper, but if no one is claiming that land I'll happily take it.
This happens more frequently then one imagines. Quite a few things fail to start from scratch and instead rely on compounded errors over time. Projections, budgets, etc., are sometimes based on stale information.
edit: map here https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-updat...
and here: https://yemen.liveuamap.com/
In the age of satellites, computers, Google maps and the like you would think a mistake like this would be impossible to persist for so long.
Interestingly all of UAE, Yemen and Saudi Arabia have significant discrepancies between the World Factbook and their shapefiles (in every case overestimating), probably all related to not having had a demarcated border in the Rub Al Khali.
(I suppose people downvoting this don’t know the reference. Way to make us feel old :) )