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Müze Gezgini
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Methodology — How the Data Is Collected and Calculated

Everything on Müze Gezgini comes from an open source, and you can always see which one. Here is how the data is collected, filtered, and where it can go wrong. The figures below are filled in automatically from the latest data update (22 September 2026).

Where the data comes from

The data passes through five layers:

  1. Wikidata. Museums in Turkey (item Q33506 and its subclasses) plus archaeological sites and ancient cities. This step returned 909 museums and 5,086 archaeological sites.
  2. OpenStreetMap (OSM). Features tagged tourism=museum and historic=archaeological_site. Opening hours, fees and accessibility are read from their tags. OSM supplied 784 museums and 2,345 archaeological sites.
  3. Wikimedia Commons. Photos, limited to CC0, public domain, CC BY and CC BY-SA licences. The cover image is taken from the Wikidata image property (P18); failing that, from the Wikipedia article's page image; failing that, from the Commons category. 1,801 entries have a cover image and 304 have a gallery, 3,412 photos in all.
  4. Wikipedia. The opening paragraph of the article, under CC BY-SA and with attribution. 1,791 entries have a Turkish description and 1,652 an English one; 30 have text written by us.
  5. Manual corrections. A small file where we fix errors in the automated data and fill gaps. It is applied last on every update.

All licences and sources are listed on the Sources page.

Matching the two datasets

The same museum usually has separate records in Wikidata and OSM, which have to be joined. We first look for a wikidata tag on the OSM feature; 1,224 entries were matched that way. Without a tag, we look for a record with a name similarity of at least 0.8 within 300 metres; 625 entries matched on name. The 1,254 OSM features that matched nothing became entries of their own. In a merged entry, the name, type and image come from Wikidata, while hours, fees and access come from OSM.

Which archaeological sites are included

Wikidata holds thousands of unnamed mounds and burial tumuli in Turkey with nothing to visit. An archaeological site is therefore included only if it has a photo or a Turkish or English Wikipedia article in Wikidata, carries a tourist-attraction, fee or opening-hours tag in OSM, or was added by hand. This rule removed 4,065 records. A further 8 records marked as closed in the sources were also dropped.

Provinces and districts

Turkey is divided into 81 provinces (il), each split into districts (ilçe). An entry's province is decided by which OpenStreetMap provincial boundary its coordinates fall inside. The district comes from Wikidata. Province outlines on the map are drawn with Natural Earth data.

How "open now" works

The "open now" badge is calculated in your browser from the OSM opening_hours tag, using the opening_hours.js library. Whatever your own time zone, the calculation uses Istanbul time. Public and religious holidays are not in the data, so the badge can be wrong on those days. Only 186 of the 3,173 entries have opening hours at all (79 of them appear to open every day). Where there are no hours, no badge is shown. We never enter or guess hours ourselves.

The Müzekart badge

The Müzekart is the annual museum card sold by the Turkish state, mainly to citizens and residents. There is no machine-readable list of the places that accept it, so the badge is based on these signals: the operator (P137) or owner (P127) in Wikidata is the Ministry of Culture and Tourism or its museums directorate; the official website sits under muze.gov.tr; the operator in OSM is the ministry; or we checked by hand, which we did for the most visited places. Known exceptions are noted on the museum page. The method can miss places; 255 entries currently carry the badge. The ministry's official list always takes priority, as the Müzekart page also points out.

The free-entry badge

A place counts as free only if OSM has fee=no or we have confirmed it by hand. A place tagged fee=yes never gets the badge. 176 entries are currently marked free. Accessibility information also comes from OSM tags (33 entries).

Prices

Prices change too often, so we show them only for the most visited places, only when confirmed from an official source, and always with the date of that check. Any price older than twelve months is hidden automatically.

Thin entries

Some entries have little more than a location. If a page has no photo, description, opening hours or official website, it is kept out of search engines (noindex); 922 entries are in that state today. An English page is indexed only when the entry has an English name plus either an English Wikipedia article or English text written by us.

Updates

The data is refreshed once a year, every January. Last update: 22 September 2026. If a new download contains more than 10 per cent fewer entries than the previous one, the update stops automatically and the old data stays. This stops a temporary fault in a source from wiping museums off the site.

Reporting a mistake

Use the "Wrong information?" line on any museum page, or write to us through the Contact page. For hours, location or fees, the quickest fix is to edit OpenStreetMap directly: your change appears here at the next update, and every other app that uses OSM data benefits from it too.