How to contribute
Send a place by email
The simplest way to add a place is an email to ceoflightmussy@gmail.com. Name the film, series or game and the place, and, if you know it, where that is written down: an article, the production's own notes or a film office page. I read every email myself. A place that a published source confirms goes onto the map at its next update, and the changelog says so, with your name if you would like it there. The rest of this page is how to add it yourself.
The most useful thing to know first is that almost nothing is added to this map directly. Every one of its 31,115 places is read from a public record, a statement on Wikidata or a sentence in a Wikipedia article, and the map is rebuilt from those records rather than edited by hand. So contributing means adding to the records, and the good news in that is that whatever you add reaches every other project reading them, not only this one. Here is what helps, starting with what helps most.
Record a filming location on Wikidata
This is the edit that lasts. A filming location statement (P915) with a reference is read at the next rebuild and becomes a pin. Video games, anime and manga use narrative location (P840) instead, where the story is set, because none of them is filmed anywhere. Something missing? walks through it in five steps and takes about a minute the first time.
A worked example, from a reader on Hacker News who had planned a trip around the game Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers and found only one dot for it. Wikidata records that game as set in New Orleans and nothing finer, and its article names only the French Quarter, so the cathedral, the cemetery and the square he visited are not here and cannot be until someone records them. The edit that fixes it is one narrative location statement per place, each with a reference. That is the whole gap between this map and the trip he took.
Write it into Wikipedia
The atlas also reads the Filming and Production sections of a production's English Wikipedia article, and 16,332 productions here rest on that kind of evidence, always labelled “per Wikipedia”. A cited sentence saying where the camera stood counts. A place named in a plot summary does not, on purpose. For games, anime and manga it also reads the setting categories on English and Japanese Wikipedia, so filing a work under the right category places it too.
Take something from the work list
The work list names 11,176 productions that have no pin at all, split by what the edit is: ones where the Wikipedia article already names the place and Wikidata holds nothing usable, which is a one minute edit with the citation already written, and ones recorded only as a whole country, which need a finer place. Both lists are ordered by how widely known the production is, so the top of each is where an edit helps the most readers.
Add a photograph
About 4% of the places here, 1,211 of them, have no picture. A photograph uploaded to Wikimedia Commons under a free licence and set as the place's image (P18) on Wikidata appears here at the next rebuild, with your name in the credit. Your own photograph of a filming location you have stood at is exactly the kind of contribution nothing else on this page can replace.
Report what is wrong
A wrong pin is either a wrong record, which is fixed on Wikidata and corrects everyone, or this site misreading a sentence, which is my mistake and gets fixed here. Either way, a report is better than a silence: ceoflightmussy@gmail.com, or anywhere on the fediverse, which is where most corrections have come from. The title, the place and where it is written down are what make a report actionable, and the person who finds a mistake is credited by name on the changelog. Statements this atlas refuses are printed on the production's own page under “Left off on purpose”, with the source, so a refusal can be argued with evidence rather than taken on trust.
What no contribution can add
A memory of where something was shot, without a source, cannot become a pin, however sure the memory is; it can become a reference if you find where it was written down. Frames from the film cannot be shown beside the place, because they belong to the studio. And a street address worked out by hand from coordinates is not recorded anywhere, so it is not printed. 939 productions here are recorded only as a country or a state, and 31,115 places in 179 countries is what has been written down so far, never everywhere a camera has ever been.
See what needs doing → The Wikidata steps About the data Changelog