Territories included

The map contains the territories included in ISO 3166, with a few modifications. Specifically, the following territories are included:

• All UN member and observer states
• All Crown dependencies and British Overseas Territories except Akrotiri and Dhekelia and the Antarctic Territories
• All territories in Overseas France except Clipperton Island and Adélie Land
• All permanently inhabited U.S. territories
• Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten
• Cook Islands, Niue, and Tokelau
• Faroe Islands and Greenland
• Antarctica
• Territories with disputed sovereignty (both partially recognized and largely unrecognized countries, all of which have de facto autonomy and control over their territory): e.g., Taiwan, Kosovo (see below)
• Territories with disputed claims: e.g., Western Sahara, Crimea (TODO: more territories like this need to be added to the map, see below)

Small countries

All countries under 20,000 km² have a rather large circle (roughly the equivalent of 20,000 km² in size) to show their position. The opacity of the circles is currently set to 0%.

Some subnational territories (French DOMs, the Chinese SARs, as well as Dutch and Australian territories) listed above can also be selected separately from, or together with, the small countries circles (see below), the circles for these regions are smaller in size (roughly the equivalent of 10,000 km²).

The smaller-size unrecognized nations included in this map (see below) also have circles of the smaller size similar to the subnational territories.

Selecting and colouring countries

Please have a look at the English Wikipedia map conventions before creating a new map.

.af, .bs
{
   fill:#2b3bb6;
}

.af, .bs
{
   opacity:1;
   fill:#2b3bb6;
}

Utilities

1. SVG script (by Biercenator talk)

A utility script written in Python is available, that can perform a number of weird and wonderful operations on this map. These include (in least-to-most-entertaining order):

• output of the original file, with all SVG transforms applied
• output as a flattened image with parallel lines of longitude (see theoretical notice)
• output as a rotated Robinson projection, with an arbitrary line of longitude at the center of the image
• output of an individual country
• addition of pinpoint marks of arbitrary size, at positions set by geographic coordinates (longitude and latitude)
• production of rendered images in PNG or JPG format
• generation of pages with clickable countries and/or clickable pinpoint marks
• replacement of the style section of the file with arbitrary CSS code, before rendering
• production of separate rendered image "layers", each containing a portion of a single map instance (useful when a bitmap editor is to be used for post-processing)

2. Gunnmap (gradiant mapmaker application, by Arthur)

Gunnmap is a little free application allowing to produce nice coloured wiki world maps according to provided data. The author, Arthur, only made some edits on wikipedia.org to announce his application, and hasn't made further edits since summer 2007. It may be need to contact him, ask him information about the status of his application, and if possible collaborate to expand it, or edit it to be more adapted to wiki-mapmakers needs. (See also theoretical notice.)

3. Recommendations to make maps

Wiki-graphists plan to set up common recommendation for all wikipedias. This is not yet done. More information at : en:Wikipedia:WikiProject Maps/Conventions‎.

4. SVG Translate script

See https://tools.wmflabs.org/svgtranslate/ – this script helps translate all text appearing in an SVG.

Comments

• There may be other useful tools available – feel free to add them here.
• There was also an effort underway to organize a team to merge all these and similar SVG tools and expand them according to the needs. The Graphic Labs and wiki-graphists already started such project (and a team of SVG programmers/think tank). This may help with easing the process of creating illustrations, spreading harmonized maps, and setting up integrated SVG tools as the needs appear.

Notice

The following notice refers to images as they existed on 18 February 2019. They may have since been changed.

In practice, a professional recommendation is not to re-use or produce:

• any map that the tool Gunnmap produces
• any derivative work of File:BlankMap-World.svg that loses the Earth's elliptical outline (e.g. File:BlankMap-World, compact.svg, File:TaiwanVisaFree.svg)
• any derivative work of File:BlankMap-World.svg that simply does some cut-off work (e.g. File:Armenia Japan Locator.svg, File:Extended Central America.svg)

The reason is, such derivative works are still Robinson projection maps, but since they lose their outline it becomes hard for readers to recognize the actual projection used. Without the outline as a reference, a reader would likely consider them as cylindrical projections instead – but the shapes of the continents will be wrong (i.e. they will not match the shapes that correspond to cylindrical projections). Because of that, any derivative work (especially the cut-off work) that uses these maps without correctly flattening/stretching them first, would also be wrong – and additionally, such derivative works may end up using very weird projections, which would not correspond to any of the standard or well-known map projections.

Another factor to consider is that, since most of these blank maps will likely be released into the public domain and the attribution not made obligatory, their derivative works could easily lose any and all information about their origins, and hence it may become impossible to track the specific projections and projection types those images will end up using.

The following are also specifically not recommended:

• any SVG script's output as a rectangular world map with parallel lines of longitude, that are the images that have only been horizontally flattened from File:BlankMap-World.svg (e.g. File:BlankMap-World-Flattened.svg, File:BlankMap-World-162E-flat.svg)

Since they are only flattened horizontally from File:BlankMap-World.svg with no vertical flattening/stretching applied, they would not be of a standard or known map projection. Be aware that they are not of an equirectangular projection either, since Robinson projection compacts the distances between the parallels (i.e. lines of equal latitude) beyond 38°N/S, and also in addition it uses interpolation to calculate exact coordinates based on the coarse grid with 5-degree spacing, see: Robinson projection#Specification. However, such flattened maps may still be "better" than either File:BlankMap-World, compact.svg or the maps that Gunnmap produces.

Finally, for any statistical world map, it's desirable to use cylindrical projections, especially either equirectangular projection or Miller cylindrical projection. If the Robinson projection is used nevertheless, the map must retain the Earth's elliptical outline to make it clear that it's Robinson and not one of the cylindrical projections.

File origins/sources

Although the origins of this file had been mis-attributed for years (from this documentation's initial creation in 2007 till early 2019), this SVG vector map seems to have been originally derived from the following file: File:"Political World" CIA World Factbook map 2005.svg. It is unclear how exactly it had been derived – converted, retraced, etc. – but it bears much closer resemblance in minute details to that SVG file than to its ultimate origin – the CIA-published vector-based PDF file (which can now be found in Perry–Castañeda Library Map Collection). Since the outlines of the countries, coastlines, etc. closely match that 2005 vector map, including some of the obvious errors – e.g. the Netherlands seemingly having an inland lake – the source now seems to have been established beyond any doubt.

Conclusion

Over the intervening years since its original creation, this blank map has been found very useful to serve as a base for multiple derivative works. It is highly recommended that any derivative maps created from this file, as well as any new updates to this file, be created using a text editor to reduce file size and to keep file structure human-editable by hand.