Jay Foreman

It happens a lot.

But the interesting thing is that map mistakes...

They often do very, very well online and on social media.

There's a whole phenomenon.

There's a Reddit thread called Maps Without New Zealand, which is people across the world collecting every time they see an example of a world map where New Zealand is strangely missing.

And it happens rather a lot.

And no matter where you post a map, if you post a map that's wrong, if it contains anything such as a spelling mistake or a city in the wrong place, people love to get involved and to respond and to get angry about it being in the wrong place.

You could even argue there might be some news networks that are potentially getting their maps wrong on purpose in order to generate clicks.

It's not impossible.

Well, that's interesting because New Zealand goes missing from maps a lot, but then again, so do plenty of other places.

So nations that go missing as well as New Zealand all the time include Iceland, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, the Caribbean, and a lot of maps forget Antarctica completely.

I think the reason that we hear so much about New Zealand going missing, and I think the reason that there's a Reddit thread with far more views dedicated to maps without New Zealand than maps without Navajo Zemlya,

is because when New Zealand goes missing, it's the funniest.

Partly because it's quite large and it's a comparatively easy game of spot the difference when it's not there.

Partly because they speak English and partly because they've made it their own.

The government website has it.

They've also... New Zealand Tourism produced this series of genuinely funny videos all about the great conspiracy to remove New Zealand.

So that's why we see so much about it.

And I think the reason it happened so much in the first place

is because it's in the bottom corner.