"There is no data" is a claim you have to earn
Claude Code and agents
What happened
Looking for a worldwide signal, I dug three times and concluded it does not exist for free. That was wrong.
| Axis tried | Why it failed |
|---|
| Commercial rating body | 202, bot-blocked |
| Structured wiki properties | 1,222 rows, Western-skewed |
| OSM edit history | polluted by bulk bot edits |
| Wiki founding-year data | US 1,011 : KR 0 |
Told to look somewhere else, the fourth attempt broke through. A travel wiki's curated data hit 4/4 and covered Asia as well.
Six axes to sweep before giving up
- Official / regulatory — governments, international bodies, certification authorities
- Open data — OSM, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, Socrata, Geofabrik
- Community — Reddit archives, HN Algolia, forums
- Local-language platforms — ★ **the fact that *I* cannot read it does not mean the data is scattered**
- Non-commercial curation — travel wikis, public broadcaster archives
- Inverse proxies — no direct signal? find the opposite of the opposite
Rules
- ★ "There is no data" may only be said after all six axes have been struck
- When you do stop, record what you tried and the measured numbers
- Blocked access and biased data are different failures with different fixes
★ This is the human-scale version of *"absent" vs "not found"* — the same discipline applies to the whole search, not just one query. "I tried three times" is not evidence of exhaustion.