Country labels silently fall back to default zooms when the Wikidata join fails

Location

https://xue.ringsaturn.me/?model=gfs&type=precip#map=1.65/28/128

Screenshots

Required information

• Browser: Safari&Chrome
• Renderer version: MapLibre GL JS 5.24.0
• Tileset version and source: hosted Protomaps API, v4
• Style JSON or NPM version

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The basemap generator uses the OSM wikidata tag to join place features with the curated zoom configuration in places.csv.

When a place=country feature temporarily loses its wikidata tag, Places.getZoomsPops() silently skips the curated configuration and retains the default zoom values. This can remove major country labels from low-zoom tiles without producing a visible build error or warning.

This occurred in an OSM data incident affecting five country nodes. The missing tags have since been restored upstream, but the currently hosted Protomaps v4 tiles still demonstrate the failure mode.

The current code only applies a curated configuration when the feature contains a matching Wikidata ID:

https://github.com/protomaps/basemaps/blob/a50c699adc60a45c899971b1e11275e61f13bfbf/tiles/src/main/java/com/protomaps/basemap/layers/Places.java#L401-L426
China has this entry in places.csv:

Q148,1,5,-1

https://github.com/protomaps/basemaps/blob/a50c699adc60a45c899971b1e11275e61f13bfbf/tiles/src/main/resources/places.csv#L42

However, in the currently hosted v4 tiles:

• China is absent from the places layer in the relevant z1 tile.
• The China feature in tile z5/25/12 has kind=country.
• It has min_zoom=6.
• It has no wikidata property.

The feature therefore behaves as if the curated Q148 entry did not exist.

List of affected counties:

Country	OSM node	Wikidata ID	Curated zoom range
China	424313582	Q148	z1-z5
Bangladesh	432424937	Q902	z2-z7
Bhutan	424311028	Q917	z3-z8
United Arab Emirates	424310703	Q878	z3-z8
South Africa	424298167	Q258	z1-z6

Upstream status:

The OSM community investigated the incident here:

https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/146752

The five missing Wikidata tags were restored on 2026-08-24:

• https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/187961324
• https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/187961907
• https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/187961949
• https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/187962033
• https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/187962099

Start in tiles/src/main/java/com/protomaps/basemap/layers/Places.java, especially Places.getZoomsPops(), and compare its behavior with the curated entries in tiles/src/main/resources/places.csv. Inspect how place=country features are handled when wikidata is absent, using the affected country examples and hosted tile details as a reproduction reference. Done means the missing Wikidata join no longer silently removes the intended low-zoom country labeling.