Other religions’ sites — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a religious site belonging to a religion that has no map of its own on this site. Some forty traditions share it, among them Chinese folk religion, Confucianism, Bahá'í, Zoroastrianism, Yazidi and Druze. There are more than 9,000 worldwide. Colour represents which religion a site belongs to, and the size of a dot represents its footprint. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, including the exact religion and the kind of site.

Where the data comes from

Every site here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from a building they walked past. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any register.

What we include

A site is here when OpenStreetMap records a religion for it that has no map of its own. The nine that do are Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Shinto, Jewish, Taoist, Sikh and Jain.

We leave out sites tagged for several religions at once, more than 1,500 of which record `multifaith`, because on a map of distinct religions that class would be one of the largest members. We also leave out a few hundred recording a non-answer such as `none` or `unknown`.

We do not fold a small religion into a larger neighbour. Yazidi, Yarsan and Druze sites stay here rather than joining the Muslim map, because that is how a small religion disappears from a map.

Colour

Colour represents the religion rather than the kind of site, because forty traditions share this map and which one a dot belongs to is the first thing worth knowing. Eleven have a colour and a name in the legend, and you can switch any of them off. Chinese folk religion is much the largest at about a fifth of the map, then Confucian and Vietnamese folk religion, spiritualist, Tenrikyo, Vodou, pagan, Bahá'í, Benzhu, Cao Dai and Zoroastrian. The panel still names the kind of site when you click a dot.

The grey class

Everything else is drawn in grey and labelled "other religion", which is between a quarter and a third of the map. It holds animist, ancestor veneration, Scientologist, Umbanda and Candomblé sites, and a great many more. OpenStreetMap records more than 1,300 distinct religion values here, and most apply to a single site, including local names, alternative spellings and values in other scripts. No legend of any length reaches into that. The grouping changes what the legend has room for, not what the data says: a Yazidi site is still recorded as Yazidi.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the site in square metres. About a third of these sites are mapped as a point with no outline, and we draw those at one nominal size. Because the sites are few and widely spread, the dots have a higher floor than we use elsewhere.

We draw places of worship as though their footprint were twice its real size, which makes them about 1.4 times as wide. It matters here because about 15% of this map is burial ground. Bahá'í, Yazidi and Zoroastrian sites are often cemeteries and dakhmas, and Chinese folk religion contributes very large cemetery complexes. Without the weighting this would be mostly a map of graveyards.

The largest feature is mis-tagged: an area of more than thirty square kilometres in Kenya recorded as Bahá'í, though its own name says it is an archaeological site. We cap the size scale below it.

Where the map is empty

A gap means nobody has mapped a site of these religions there. This map is spread more widely than most, because it is not one religion with one heartland but forty with heartlands all over. Where a tradition is small or local, its mapping is usually thin.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. A site shown here may have closed or changed hands.

Source and licence

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