World Heritage Site

This is a follow-up to last week’s blog post, and to an earlier one: several people have reached out to me saying that they want more statistics! I did have quite a number of these queries already available in raw format, and they were easy to transform into public pages that are dynamically updated. So that’s what I did in the past week.

Most potential I think lies in the data centered around Community Members and around Countries. As a start, I have focused on the Community data. I will look into the possibilities regarding Countries after my upcoming 6-week trip to the Americas.

Preconditions

Of course, it would be technically possible to combine the data of every community member (1563 with at least 1 WHS visited) with every category/connection/year/country, etc, but that would not lead to particularly interesting pages to look at. And running all those queries would be too hard on the database as well.

So I started working with the following preconditions:

• Use the Hall of Fame approach: the travel goal should be relatively hard to achieve.
• The lists should show a diversity of angles so that people can excel in their niche and the members with the highest overall scores do not always end up first.

The first batch

The following pages are now live and accessible via this link (also in the Navigation Bar via Community/Communitystats). They are dynamically updated once a day – which means that when you ‘tick’ your final Italian WHS your name will automatically appear in the list after 24 hours.

Countries complete

This is similar to what I presented in last week’s blog post. It only lists those members who have fully completed the country’s WHS. There’s one page with the Top 5-countries and one page with other difficult-to-complete countries.

Years complete

This lists the community members who have completed one of the first 10 years of the WH list. This is very difficult to achieve, I think it will be interesting to see whether more people can complete one or more of the early years in the future.

Civilizations complete

The focus here lies on ‘civilizations’ (or similar) that were spread across multiple countries and have a significant amount of connected sites. Members that are strong in a particular region can stand out in one of these categories.

Most intrepid travellers

This page groups queries where particular travel stamina is shown, such as visits to WHS in the most different countries, WHS in danger and WHS on Uninhabited Islands.

Best by Continent

The page shows the members who scored the highest on WHS in a particular 'continent'. The UNESCO WH definition, called 'Region' is used which splits the world into 5 continents.

Best positioned for the next WHC

This is a query that I often use myself, and I think it is of interest to those who proactively visit TWHS that are close to an inscription. Based on our prognosis of which sites will be nominated in the coming 3 years, the page shows how high your potential score will be based on your TWHS ‘ticks’.

Are there additional statistics you’d like to see that are related to the achievements of community members?