A CodeSights flagship for the engineering and geospatial crowd: 317 of the world's major dams, scraped wide from each dam's {{Infobox dam}} with every column at least a quarter populated. It carries dam type, height, length, structure volume, the river it crosses (join Every River), its reservoir (join Large Lakes), reservoir capacity, surface and catchment, installed power capacity and annual generation, construction and opening years, status, and coordinates. The famous finding is that the dam boom moved east: China hosts 47 of the rostered dams, more than twice the United States, and owns the modern giants, with the Three Gorges Dam the most powerful operational station on Earth at 22,500 MW and the planned Medog project set to nearly triple it. As with lakes, no single number ranks a dam: the tallest (Usoi, a natural landslide dam at 567 m), the largest reservoir (Kariba at 180 cubic kilometres) and the most powerful are three different structures. Imperial-first infoboxes are converted to metric, and coordinates cover most rows for mapping. Ten acceptance tests, one of which enforces the 25 percent fill rule on every column. Dams without a dedicated article are out of scope.
317 rows in one CSV file, with 20 columns in total: Dam, Dam_ID, Country, River, Reservoir, Dam_Type, Status, Construction_Began, Opening_Year, Height_m, Length_m, Structure_Volume_m3, Reservoir_Capacity_km3, Reservoir_Surface_km2, Catchment_km2, Power_Capacity_MW, Annual_Generation_GWh, Latitude, Longitude, Dam_URL.
It is built by programmatically scraping en.wikipedia.org, last pulled on 2026-10-17. Datasets are versioned; older versions stay downloadable.
Yes. Every CodeSights dataset is completely free as a CSV download; a free account is all it takes. Anyone can preview the data without signing in.
Yes. The exact Python scraper that built it is viewable on the dataset page by any signed-in member, so every number is reproducible.
River joins Every River on river name; Reservoir joins Large Lakes; Latitude and Longitude map each dam.
Automated scraping leaves room for error and the underlying sources change over time, so no version is guaranteed accurate or complete. If a number matters, verify it against the original source.