fractal dimension of countries - is wikipedia imprecise?

[cKleinhuis]

hello all,

this might be of interest for many, i am right now playing around or searching for fractal dimensions of countries, especially libya, england and norway
and i stumbled upon something that i would like to discuss

wikipedia does not give information on border lengthes for countries, what wikipedia does is giving the area of a country

either measured in squaremiles, or in square kilometers

so, it occured to me that there must be obviously calculation errors when calculating the area of a country out of its measured
square miles area, compared to a country that is measured in square kilometers and then calculated back to square miles

so, and funny enough i actually found an example and i would like to know from you what do you think, is the error due to the measurement scale?

for example usa:

in the german wikipedia the give the area of the united states with:
    9.629.091 (UN 2007)[2] km²

and in the english wikipedia version the state it with:
        9,826,675 km2 [1][c](3rd/4th)
        3,794,101 sq mi

the latter is obviously bigger, might it be that the latter one is measured in square miles, and then the square kilometers are out of this calculated ?!?!

shouldnt wikipedia give the base format from which a derived result is obtained state ?!

or i am getting something wrong and this is just due to measurement failures !?

[kram1032]

The area shouldn't technically change too much from the fractal structure coastlines. As you nicely quoted, both measurements have sources associated with them. You could easily look at those sources and possibly find out how they were measured.