For 100 Years, Every Source Got Yemen's Size Wrong
What is the size of Yemen? (2024)
A comment on a video led me down a rabbit hole: Yemen's area is listed as 555,000 km² by Google and Wikipedia, but drawing its borders on Google Maps gives only 456,000 km². Tracing the error back to a 1904 encyclopedia and a 1976 World Bank report, I found that both North and South Yemen's sizes were inflated and then combined after unification. The real area is about 424,000 km², making Yemen the 54th largest UN member state, not the 49th.
Because for 100 years, no one bothered to fact-check their geographic tables. Even every single online statistic that contains the size of the country is… wrong.
- walrus01
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.
edit: map here https://understandingwar.org/research/middle-east/iran-updat...
and here: https://yemen.liveuamap.com/
- em-bee
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.
- asveikau
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.
- burlesona
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…”
- bambax
Great article. I wonder if the sum of the land areas of all countries on earth matches the global size of emerged land? Or are there other similar errors?