Sources and credits

Photographs, ratings, lists, reviews, and practical judgments are mine. The voice on a city page or pin page is mine. If a review feels unfair or a fact is wrong, I am happy to clarify how I arrived at it. Direct message on LinkedIn is the fastest way to reach me; there are no comments on the site on purpose.

The lead paragraph on a city, country, or pin page is often the article summary returned by the Wikipedia REST API. Article text is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Each block that quotes a Wikipedia article carries an attribution footer with the article title and license link. Wikipedia content is generously made available by the English Wikipedia community.

Where a pin uses a Wikipedia thumbnail as a fallback hero, the image carries its own credit on the source article (photographer plus license). Click through to the article to see the file metadata.

Population, area, GDP, HDI, life expectancy, civic flags, and coats of arms come from Wikidata, made available under CC0. City flags are pulled via P41 (flag image) and P94 (coat of arms image), then served from Wikimedia Commons.

The UNESCO ID on a pin links to the canonical entry on the World Heritage List. The list itself is the authoritative source for inscription year, criteria, and site name; the atlas only stores the ID and links out for the rest.

Pins tagged Atlas Obscura come from my personal “Been Here” history on atlasobscura.com. The Atlas Obscura slug on a pin links back to their canonical entry, where the editorial copy and photographs for that place live. Their catalogue is one of the better editorially-curated indexes of unusual places online and worth supporting directly through their membership program.

Restaurants tagged with Bib Gourmand or a Michelin star designation reflect the entries listed on the Michelin Guide at the time I dined. The atlas only carries Michelin entries I have actually eaten at, with a personal review and price-tier note. The Michelin star and Bib Gourmand marks are trademarks of Michelin; this site is not affiliated with or endorsed by them.

Saved lists are exported from my Google Maps account via Google Takeout and curated into the Lists section. Pin enrichment data (opening hours, current price level, phone number, average rating) is fetched from the Google Places API on a periodic refresh. The “Open in Google Maps” link on each pin is generated from the pin’s coordinates.

Postcard back-of-card maps and inline base maps use raster tiles from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors, available under the Open Database License (ODbL). Each map carries the “© OpenStreetMap” attribution overlay required by the tile usage policy.

The monthly temperature and rainfall chart on each city page draws from NASA POWER, which makes its data freely available with the request that publications credit the source. Per their acknowledgment guidance: “These data were obtained from the NASA Langley Research Center POWER Project funded through the NASA Earth Science Directorate Applied Science Program.” Where NASA POWER does not have a station near the city, the chart falls back to Open-Meteo, used under their open API terms.

Rectangular country flags come from flagcdn.com, which rehosts the open-source flag-icons collection by Panayiotis Lipiridis. Circular country flag badges come from HatScripts/circle-flags by Adam Vaculik. Both libraries are released under the MIT license.

Hero images and gallery photos on pin and city pages are mine, taken on the trips the atlas tracks. They are served via Supabase Storage and are not licensed for redistribution. If you are in one of them and would prefer not to be, message me and I will remove the photo.

Some pins that lack a real photograph carry a generated art-deco-style poster as the card and fallback hero image. These are produced internally for the atlas as placeholder covers; they are clearly stylized and are not photographs of the place. They are replaced by a personal photo whenever I take one.