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I am making a map using coordinates downloaded as a CSV file directly from the Anecdata website. I download the coordinates to QGIS and created an ESRI Shapefile layer. The points appear very close together off the West Coast of Africa near Null Island, instead of distributed across the upper half of Oregon. The points are so close together that I have to zoom down below 1:1 scale to view them all.
I checked both the Shapefile and Open Street Maps to make sure they both have the same CRS. They do (EPSG 3857-WGS 84).

Why is the data I downloaded mapped so oddly?

I am using a new Mac with the M1 chip and QGIS 3.16 LTR. There have been minimal issues with it prior to today.

You may have to be a member of the project to use the following link to the data: https://www.anecdata.org/projects/view/302

Noah Strong
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    My guess would be that the coordinates in the csv you downloaded are in wgs84 epsg:4326, a geographic coordinate system with degrees as units. Probably you have told qgis that they are in wgs84 pseudomercator epsg:3857, a meter based crs with its origin at 'null island'. So all your points are plotting around 45m north and 120m west of null Island, within a few meters of each other. – Ben W Oct 12 '21 at 06:46
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    A link to the download or a copy of your datafile would be very useful here. Otherwise we're guessing. Can you edit your question and add it? – Spacedman Oct 12 '21 at 07:20
  • As mentioned by others, you very probably set a wrong CRS for your data. You must define your layer in the CRS that was used to create the data. See here for background: https://gis.stackexchange.com/a/383437/88814 – Babel Oct 12 '21 at 12:03
  • Thank you all. I was able to adjust. By setting the CRS of the data points to NAD_1983_2011, the points display accurately on my map. At the same time, Opens Street map CRS is set to EPSG 3857. It was my understanding that having two different CRS in the same map set led to issues with accuracy. – Noah Strong Oct 12 '21 at 19:51

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