For 100 Years, Every Source Got Yemen's Size Wrong
What is the size of Yemen? (2024)
A comment on a video led me down a rabbit hole: Yemen's area is listed as 555,000 km² by Google and Wikipedia, but drawing its borders on Google Maps gives only 456,000 km². Tracing the error back to a 1904 encyclopedia and a 1976 World Bank report, I found that both North and South Yemen's sizes were inflated and then combined after unification. The real area is about 424,000 km², making Yemen the 54th largest UN member state, not the 49th.
Because for 100 years, no one bothered to fact-check their geographic tables. Even every single online statistic that contains the size of the country is… wrong.