Data of geonames.org on a world map: 7,85 million as of 2011.

Red is cities, blue is lakes and rivers, and green is topological features like hills. Everything else is gray, and of course when different kinds of features overlap they add up towards white. Hydrological features like lakes and streams (“H” code) are blue, populated features like towns and cities (“P” code) are red, and topological features like mountains and valleys (“T” code) are green. Everything else (e.g., artificial landmarks) is gray. It’s easy to see some patterns in what’s colored where. For example, it looks like someone’s been uploading coordinates for the inhabited places in many map grid cells of China, but there’s relatively little attention paid to the rivers there. On the other hand, we see a whole lot of named water and very few named villages in eastern Canada. This should be taken as a map of mapping, as it were, not as a map of the world at any consistent level of detail.

• Data: Geonames (Creative Commons!).

• GeoNames Country Statistic as of 2011-10-12: 7,851,644 Total
• Geonames codes: http://www.geonames.org/export/codes.html
• Geonames codes statistics: http://www.geonames.org/statistics/total.html as of 2011-10-30
  • 2.926.005 Total for P
  • 1.652.707 Total for H
  • 1.024.324 Total for T
  • Total: 7.856.976