A CodeSights flagship for the history and urban-design crowd: 250 world's fairs and expositions that have their own Wikipedia article, scraped wide from each fair's {{Infobox World's Fair}}. Every column shown is at least a quarter populated by design: host city and country, expo class (Universal or Specialized), BIE category, opening and closing dates, duration, site area in hectares, attendance, participating countries, venue and coordinates. The famous finding is that attendance exploded. The 1851 Great Exhibition in London drew about 6 million, while Expo 2010 in Shanghai drew more than 73 million, the best-attended fair in history, and the top of the attendance table is entirely modern (Osaka 1970, Montreal 1967). The fairs cluster in a Victorian-to-Edwardian golden age from the 1870s through the 1910s, then thin out and reinvent themselves as themed expos. Durations run from a few months to the two-year fairs such as the 1915 to 1916 Panama-California Exposition, and the largest site tops 1,000 hectares. Nine acceptance tests, one of which enforces the 25 percent fill rule on every column. Fairs without a dedicated article are out of scope.
250 rows in one CSV file, with 17 columns in total: Fair, Fair_ID, Year, Host_City, Host_Country, Expo_Class, BIE_Category, Opening_Date, Closing_Date, Duration_Days, Area_ha, Visitors, Participating_Countries, Venue, Latitude, Longitude, Fair_URL.
It is built by programmatically scraping en.wikipedia.org, last pulled on 2026-10-17. Datasets are versioned; older versions stay downloadable.
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