A Wikipedia editor and a history professor teamed up to visualize the population of U.S. cities and towns throughout history with more detail than the U.S. Census.

Creating Data is an online visualization that maps the locations of cities of over 50,000 people and lets you see how their populations have grown and fallen across the years since 1865. The overall picture is an awe-inspiring testament to America’s ever-migrating masses, as well as an endorsement of Wikipedia’s open crowdsourced model, and an indictment of the limitations of the census.

Benjamin Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, created the database after stumbling upon Jacob Alperin-Sheriff’s work updating historical city populations on Wikipedia.

While searching the online encyclopedia for city records, Schmidt discovered that it often had more extensive population entries than the official census data he had been using. As it turned out, Alperin-Sheriff, now a cryptographer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, spent the last five years updating Wikipedia entries with more than 25,000 city populations under the username DemocraticLuntz.

“I realized it was not just that people had been entering their own cities all around the country the way we sometimes think of Wikipedia working,” Schmidt, who used the dataset to create an interactive map, told Inman. “It was actually one guy who had entered in tens of thousands of historical population entries all around the United States.”

As a result, Schmidt asked Alperin-Sheriff for the data he collected and used it to create a visual map. To get the most extensive city records possible, Schmidt mined Wikipedia for city populations entered by other people, often historians working on their own city or town.

Along with showing current populations, the interactive dataset tracks movement trends across time. For example, the map tracks people’s increasing migration to the suburbs throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Midwestern cities like Detroit, Cleveland and Chicago all saw up to 40 percent of their population move to the nearby suburban areas during that time.

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