Sikh sites — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a Sikh site. Most are gurdwaras, and the rest are the grounds a gurdwara stands in, schools, offices, community buildings and a few burial sites. There are more than 2,000 worldwide. Colour represents which kind of site it is, and the size of a dot represents its footprint. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as the denomination. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link to the full article, in your own language where possible.

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 of gurdwaras.

What we include

A site is here when OpenStreetMap's `religion` tag says `sikh`. We take the tag at its word and don't second-guess it from a building's name or its architecture, which also means we inherit its mistakes. One large site here is a Masonic temple in Florida that a mapper recorded as Sikh. A handful of sites record two religions at once, Hindu and Sikh among them, and those appear on both religions' maps.

Ravidassia sites are not folded in. OpenStreetMap records Ravidassia under a value of its own, so we leave those sites off this map. Whether Ravidassia is a separate religion or a tradition within Sikhism is a live question within the community, and not one we can settle.

Colour

Colour represents the kind of site rather than the religion, because the religion is the whole map. About nine in ten dots are places of worship, so most of what you see is gurdwaras. The rest are grounds mapped as their own plot, schools, markers, offices, community buildings and a fallback class for religious buildings.

The nearly empty classes

Several rows in the legend hold only a handful of sites, and for two of them that reflects Sikh practice rather than a gap in the mapping. Sikhism has no monastic tradition, so there are no monasteries to record. Sikh funeral rites use cremation and need no burial ground, so burial sites are few. We keep both rows because those sites do exist. No site on this map is recorded as a former site.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the site in square metres. About 40% of these sites are mapped as a point with no outline, and we draw those at one nominal size. Whether a site was traced as an outline is mostly a matter of how thoroughly it was mapped, not of how large it stands.

We draw gurdwaras as though their footprint were twice its real size, which makes them about 1.4 times as wide. A gurdwara is a building, and a Sikh school has playing fields around it, so without the weighting the two largest dots on the whole map were schools. These sites are small, so the dots also have a higher floor than we use elsewhere, or a typical gurdwara would sit at the smallest size we can draw.

Where the map is empty

An empty area means nobody has mapped a gurdwara there, not that none stands there. Gurdwaras in Britain, Canada and the United States are mapped close to completely. In Punjab, where most gurdwaras stand and most villages have one, only a small share of them are in OpenStreetMap, so a dense patch on this map means a well-mapped place first and a Sikh one second. We can't correct for that, because we have no independent count to correct against.

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, and a gurdwara that has just opened in a converted building takes a while to reach the map.

Source and licence

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