Ah I'm glad. That's much better than the solution I had in mind of using the sand from the desert to expand the land into the sea to add extra 100k km of land area, to hide all this embarrassment under the rug.

The author was one of the people involved in the wikipedia discussion

They knew the figure was wrong but needed a document with the correct figure they could reference.

I actually measured the size of (parts of) Yemen on maps a week or two ago, trying to figure out the population density of the Houthi-controlled areas, which contain the majority (~70-80%, hard to say exactly as the population distribution has been changing rapidly in the past decade) of Yemen's population in about 1/3 of it's land.

Something about eyeballs and all bugs being shallow...

A bunch of countries are suspected of undercounting their population because so many people are living "off the grid" or deliberately overcounting to get more funding. Probably some of the cases are real and some are just conspiracy theories.

Imagine how much of published science is statistically significant only due to clerical errors and mistakes in calculation...

(See e.g. The misreporting of statistical results in psychology journals; Bakker, Wicherts; Behaviour Research Methods; 2011.)

These kinds of issues have existed since the first human started recording what they owned, and will probably continue plaguing us until the last one dies.