What these directories are, and what they are not

A set of curated directories, holding 5,077 entries so far. Every list answers one question: in this subject, what has the world written most about? The entries are chosen by machine from open data, and nothing said about any of them is invented.

How a list is built

Every list starts as a question put to Wikidata, the open database behind Wikipedia: every item that is a theorem, say, or a painting, or a chemical element. A candidate needs its own English Wikipedia article. Candidates are then ranked by the number of Wikimedia sites with a page about them — Wikipedia's language editions, mostly, and sister projects such as Wikiquote. That counts how many communities independently thought something worth describing, and nobody can buy their way into it.

Ranking alone makes a poor list, because Wikidata classifies generously. So each list is filtered for what it is really about, and where Wikidata files something under a list it does not belong to, it is removed by hand. The list says so: every removal, and every entry kept by hand, is named at the foot of its page with the reason.

The description under each entry is a summary of its Wikipedia article, rewritten for this site by a language model and then checked against the article by machine: a rewrite may not carry a number the article does not, and may not copy the article's wording. The facts are Wikipedia's; the wording is this site's. The photograph is the image Wikidata records for it, served from Wikimedia Commons, with the photographer and licence named beside it. The notes explaining an entry removed or kept by hand are this site's own.

How a travel guide is built

The travel guides work the same way, with rules of their own. Candidates are everything in a country that is a built structure, a landform, a protected area or a tourist attraction, and has coordinates, a photograph and an English Wikipedia article. Anything shared with more than one neighbouring country is dropped, because the Alps are not a French landmark. Anything that is really an administrative unit, a settlement, an airport, a station, a stadium, a hospital or a stretch of open water is dropped. Islands are kept but ranked lower, so Japan leads with Mount Fuji rather than with Honshu, while the Maldives, which is nothing but islands, still gets a guide. Places on UNESCO's World Heritage list rank a little higher.

What it is not

It is not a review site: nothing is rated, and no rating is invented to fill a field a search engine would like to see. It is not exhaustive: a list shows the most written-about entries, not everything there is. And it is not neutral about the world: Wikipedia covers the anglophone and European world more than the rest, and a ranking built on it inherits that.

The connectivity note

Every page ends with a collapsed note suggesting Computatus eSIM data plans, read from their own catalogue export dated 2026-07-31. On a travel guide it lists that country's plans; on a list of places — World Heritage, museums, natural wonders — it names the cheapest plan for each country on the list; on a cuisine, that cuisine's country; everywhere else, the destinations travellers ask about most. A commission on plans bought through those links is what pays for this site. Every entry is chosen and ranked before any price is looked up, so nothing on any list depends on what a plan costs, and no title, description or heading mentions one.

Corrections

Entries and descriptions come from Wikidata and Wikipedia, so the most durable way to correct one is to correct it there; these directories pick the change up on their next refresh.