I've had a Wikipedia account for a while, but it was a few months ago that I decided to improve its coverage of skyscrapers and skylines, especially in "list of tallest building" pages, over the long-term. Knowing that each of the skyscraper databases (like CTBUH and SSP) have holes in their data, I thought it would be a good idea to make Wikipedia a good source of tall building data going forward by gathering all reliable data that can be found there, now that Emporis is gone. Especially since searching for a full list on CTBUH is paywalled past 25 entries. Editing missing or wrong info is also much easier on Wikipedia compared to SSP or CTBUH.
Since June I've updated a few tallest building pages to have a more detailed lead, a history section, a map, and a graph showing the growth of tall buildings over time. One of the first cities I did this for were the big five Canadian cities:
I also did the same for some big European skylines (Frankfurt, Warsaw, Rotterdam, and Milan) as well as
New York City and
Chicago, among others. Basically my goal is to get more people to appreciate, or at least be aware of, interesting things about a city's skyline and its growth. I'm particularly happy about the history section I wrote for Toronto and Chicago, so give those a read if you're interested!
This is an ongoing project so I'd like to post about any new pages I'll be working on here. Of course if you find anything missing or incorrect, please let me know. Currently I'm working on the main US skylines, and I've added a cleaned up the intro, and added coordinates, and a map and chart to Boston, LA, Miami, Philly, and SF, though they don't have a detailed history section yet. Next up is Houston or Dallas, whose pages are pretty outdated. The maps replicate the skyscraper map function on SSP except they are numbered by height and colored by completion date (I'm hoping this feature will catch on lol)
And if you want to help out, that would be appreciated too! Sometimes it seems like I'm the only editor working on these pages at all, but I'm sure there's a lot of people with interests in urbanism or skyscrapers in general, but just don't edit Wikipedia.
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