Our new site, the full wiki has brought together Google Maps and Wikipedia. Now you can view any article on Wikipedia with all the locations mentioned on a Google Map

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You can see at a glance where most of the activity in the Renaissance happened, namely Europe and primarily in Italy. Where are the world's tornados? Or volcanos? Heat waves? Nuclear power plants?

The map and the article are linked throughout. Click on a map marker and it jumps to that part of the article. Click on an article marker and it will show you that location on the map.

See for example our tourism fact map. If we click on Bangkok (Q), for example, we can see the relevant part of the article and learn that it's the third most visited city in the world. Or zooming into Europe and clicking on Nice, Wikipedia tells us it was one of the first and best established resorts in the French Riveria.


Some more examples:

• See what happened all around the world in 1945.
  
• See where the drug trade is carried out.
  
• Barack Obama has the most international background of any recent US president. See it mapped.
  

From the makers of NationMaster comes a new project aimed at harnessing the wealth of content of wikis.

It's called the The Full Wiki. Its goal is to become a platform for an enriched user experience for wikis using open licenses.

We have seen many fantastic projects come and go under the weight of traffic spikes, large datasets and the need to stay fresh. We want to provide serious hosting resources to make these projects feasible.

If you have a wiki oriented project you'd like us to host or provide other help, check out The Full Wiki.

We've been working away for the past month and are pleased to announce a raft of new little features:

• Refined moderation of user comments. Your valued contributions will appear on the site quicker.
  
• Top rankings pages now show the top 5 most popular stats for each variable, rather than the top 1.
  
• We've put a search box at the bottom of each page, so it's convenient to find new things out of our vast collection.
  
• The encyclopedia home page has been cleaned up, showing categories and themes.
  
• Best of all: you can now sort by amount and alphabetical order on graph pages with instant feedback. No need to wait for the page to reload

We hope these modifications improve your experience. Feel free to drop us a line with any thoughts of your own.

We have just updated our CIA World Factbook stats, making use of the December 18 version.

But at NationMaster, we don't just use the latest Factbook, but all the other ones going back to 2003. So you can compare time series information with ease, for example, graph the growth of the Chinese internet users.

Today I'm pleased announce a sizable update!

This time it's a mix of updates and entirely new stats. We now have population figures updated for 2008.

We have a raft of updated media stats: we have radios, TV's, newspapers. Did you know that Chinese newspapers have a circulation of 76 million? Or that Amenia has a cinema seat for every 20 people?

And new to NationMaster, books broken down by genre. See who's producing the most titles in areas such as religion, literature, arts and science.

Our tourism stats are getting comprehensive too. We can now tell you the destinations favoured by Africans, Southern Asians or Europeans.

Keep checking back. We have a lot more in the works over the next month.