Sikh sites — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is a Sikh site of any kind recorded in OpenStreetMap — not only gurdwaras, but the grounds they stand in, Sikh schools, offices, community buildings and the occasional burial site. Just over 2,100 worldwide, drawn as a dot sized by footprint area and coloured by what kind of site it is. At the closest zooms the dot is joined by the building's mapped outline, where one has been drawn.

This is the companion to the places of worship map, which colours every religion's places of worship by religion. This one takes a single religion and shows everything of it that is mapped.

Click any site to see what OpenStreetMap records about it — the kind of site it is, and its denomination where that was recorded. Where the site has a Wikipedia article, a short summary is fetched live and shown in your own language; and every site links to the OpenStreetMap object it came from.

The most important thing on this page

This map shows where Sikh sites have been mapped, and that is not the same as where they are. The distortion here is the sharpest of any religion map on this site, and it runs in a direction that inverts the truth.

The United Kingdom has on the order of 250–300 gurdwaras, and OpenStreetMap holds essentially all of them. Punjab alone has many thousands — most villages have one — and OpenStreetMap holds a low single-digit percentage. The counts on this map come out as India 61%, the UK 11%, the USA 6%, Canada 6%.

Read naively, the map says "Sikhism is a British and Canadian religion with a presence in India." That is the opposite of the truth. India's share should be overwhelming, and it is 61% only because the diaspora's gurdwaras are mapped nearly completely while Punjab's are barely mapped at all.

We cannot correct for this, because we have no independent count of gurdwaras in India to correct against. So the map is published with the distortion stated rather than silently smoothed, and a dense patch on it means a well-mapped place first and a Sikh one second.

Colour

Colour shows what kind of site it is, not which religion — the religion is the whole map. Nine kinds appear:

Place of worship — the gurdwara itself. 90.5% of this map, on one tag.
Grounds — the plot mapped as its own polygon rather than the building.
School — Sikh schools and religious colleges.
Marker — a shrine or marker rather than a building anyone enters.
Office, community building, burial site, monastery — each present, each in single or low double figures.
Religious building — the fallback, for a building the other rules did not name.

Four of those rows are all but empty, and that is a fact about Sikhism rather than a gap in the data. There is no Sikh monastic tradition to map, and Sikh funerary practice is cremation without a burial ground, so a monastery row of one and a burial row of nine are the honest numbers, not missing ones. They are shown rather than hidden because they exist, and a legend that quietly dropped them would misstate what the map holds.

One kind is missing entirely: no Sikh site on this map is recorded as a former site.

Which sites count as Sikh

A site is on this map when OpenStreetMap's `religion` tag says `sikh`. That tag is what the mapper stated, and it is taken at its word — a building's architecture, its name and its denomination are not second-guessed.

A handful of sites are tagged for more than one religion at once, `hindu;sikh` among them. Those appear on both religions' maps, because they genuinely belong to both.

Because the map trusts the tag, it also inherits the tag's mistakes. At least one large site here is a Masonic temple in Florida that a mapper recorded as `religion=sikh`; it is drawn as a Sikh place of worship because that is what the source says. Correcting it means correcting OpenStreetMap, which anyone can do.

`Ravidassia` sites are not folded in. OpenStreetMap records Ravidassia under its own value rather than as Sikh, and this map follows the tag, so those sites appear on the map of other religions. Whether Ravidassia is a distinct religion or a tradition within Sikhism is a live question within the community itself, and it is not one this map is in a position to settle — following the tag is the only answer it can honestly give.

Size

Each symbol is sized by footprint area — the ground the mapped outline covers, in square metres measured on the globe. Symbol area is proportional to footprint, so a site four times the area draws twice as wide.

About 39% of these sites are mapped as a single point with no outline, and so have no footprint. Rather than draw them all at the smallest size, they are given a nominal, typical size. Whether a site is mapped as a point or an outline is mostly a matter of how thoroughly it was mapped, not of how large it stands.

Gurdwaras are drawn as though their footprint were twice its real size — about 1.4 times the width. This is a deliberate weighting, and the only one on the map. A gurdwara is a building; a Sikh school has playing fields around it. Without the weighting the two largest symbols on this entire map were schools, and the sites the map is about were the smallest things on it. The weighting is small enough to leave the real order intact: a large site still outdraws a small one within any kind.

Sikh sites are small compared with most of what this site maps, so the symbols also have a higher floor than other layers — a typical gurdwara would otherwise sit within a pixel of the smallest size at every zoom worth looking at.

Footprint is physical extent, not importance or congregation. The Golden Temple complex covers more ground than a village gurdwara, and the map says nothing about which matters more to the people who use it.

Sites with no name

78% of the sites here carry a name, and the unnamed ones are shown just the same. A site with no name is one nobody has recorded a name for, not one that is not there.

A picture of the present

Today's map, not a history. OpenStreetMap is edited continuously; this copy is refreshed periodically. There is no year control, and a site closed or converted long ago may still be mapped until a mapper updates it.

Source and licence

Back to the map