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

[ringsaturn]

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:

basemaps/tiles/src/main/java/com/protomaps/basemap/layers/Places.java

Lines 401 to 426 in a50c699

	private ZoomsPops getZoomsPops(Matcher.SourceFeatureWithComputedTags sf2, String kind, int population) {
	var zoomMatches = zoomsIndex.getMatches(sf2);
	int minZoom = getInteger(sf2, zoomMatches, "pm:minzoom", 99);
	int maxZoom = getInteger(sf2, zoomMatches, "pm:maxzoom", 99);
	int kindRank = getInteger(sf2, zoomMatches, "pm:kindRank", 99);
	int populationRank = 0;
	for (int i = 0; i < popBreaks.length; i++) {
	if (population >= popBreaks[i]) {
	populationRank = i + 1;
	}
	}
	if (WIKIDATA_CONFIGS.containsKey(sf2.getString("wikidata"))) {
	var wikidataConfig = WIKIDATA_CONFIGS.get(sf2.getString("wikidata"));
	if (kind.equals("country") || kind.equals("region")) {
	minZoom = wikidataConfig.minZoom();
	maxZoom = wikidataConfig.maxZoom();
	}
	if (kind.equals("locality")) {
	minZoom = wikidataConfig.minZoom();
	populationRank = wikidataConfig.rankMax();
	}
	}
	return new ZoomsPops(minZoom, maxZoom, kindRank, populationRank);

China has this entry in places.csv:

Q148,1,5,-1

basemaps/tiles/src/main/resources/places.csv

Line 42 in a50c699

Q148,1,5,-1

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