The index has grown from a hand-checked core of 165 waterfalls to 1,142, drawing on Wikidata and Wikipedia for the rest (how that works). Numbers across a set that size start to say something about the world's waterfalls, so here is what they say, with the usual caveat that an index reflects what has been written about, not what exists. Norway has more waterfalls than the Faroe Islands; it also has more people writing them up.
By continent
Asia 316; Europe 307; North America 234; Oceania 126; Africa 104; South America 55. Europe and North America lead because they are the best documented, not because they have the most falling water; the Congo basin and Papua New Guinea are almost certainly under-counted by any index built from English-language sources.
By country
The ten countries with the most entries: United States 146; India 77; Australia 67; Canada 61; New Zealand 56; United Kingdom 49; Japan 44; Norway 37; Iceland 32; Philippines 19. 123 countries have at least one. The country pages hold the full breakdown, and each one now has a regional hub above it.
By type
cascade 728; plunge 192; tiered 88; cataract 38; block 37; segmented 34; horsetail 18; fan 7. Cascade is the default when an article describes a fall without naming its form, so its share is inflated; plunge and tiered are the ones people bother to specify. The types explained.
By height
683 of the 1,142 have a recorded height. The median is 57 m, which is a useful corrective: the famous giants are rare, and most of the world's named waterfalls are between 10 and 50 metres. 234 are 100 m or more and 46 clear 500 m (the list). The tallest is Angel Falls; the tallest list explains why that is still argued.
Connections
32 sit inside UNESCO World Heritage Sites (list). 18 straddle an international border (list). 71 are places where swimming is a normal part of the visit (list). 32 rivers drop over two or more falls in the index (list), and 101 clusters of three or more falls sit within 35 km of each other (trails, road trips). The most northerly entry is Pitsusköngäs at 69.2°N and the most southerly is Salto Grande at 51.1°S (the ends of the earth).
What is missing
Everything that nobody has photographed and written up in English. If you know a waterfall that should be here, the about page says how to tell us; the next thousand will come from readers as much as from databases.
