About A Nomad’s Guide

What a collection is

A finite set of places with a total attached. A country, a region, a category such as waterfalls or temples, or a list somebody sat down and made. The total is what turns a map into something you can finish, and it is why a collection page shows the places still ahead of you on the same screen as the ones behind.

Countries, regions and categories work out their own membership from the places themselves, so a new place in Japan joins the Japan collection the day it is added. That cuts both ways, and it is worth knowing before you go looking for a bug: a collection you have finished can open back up when the guide grows into it. Progress here follows the catalog rather than freezing the moment you close something out.

Where the places come from

The catalog is chosen and maintained by hand rather than scraped off a map, and it grows in sittings as places are researched and added. Where a place has a Wikipedia article, its description is an extract from it, abridged and credited under CC BY-SA 4.0 on the page it appears on. Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under their own licences, credited on the place’s own page to the photographer who took it. Where the writing is ours, there is no credit line, because there is nothing to credit.

How it works out where to send you next

The suggestions on your dashboard are scored against your own record: how near a place is to somewhere you have been, which collections you are closest to closing, the categories you keep choosing, and how many other travellers have collected it. A share of every list is held back for a country you have never set foot in, because a ranking built on where you have been will otherwise keep sending you back there.

No language model is involved, and nothing about you is sent anywhere to produce it. The same rule runs for everyone. Only the record it reads is yours.