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Is there data available for all lakes on Earth? Even just a list of names would be nice; metadata is also welcome.

In this case, a lake is any enclosed body of water with a surface area between some arbitrary limits. Maybe someone already wrote a script that can provide such an output?

Wikipedia has a couple of lists, but they have a lower limit, i.e. small lakes are not listed.

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  • geonames.org would be a first place to look -- openstreetmap.org may be useful too.
    – user3856
    Commented Jun 20, 2018 at 16:28
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    Please add your minumim size requirements and what kind of metadata you want.
    – user4293
    Commented Jun 20, 2018 at 17:51
  • github.com/barrycarter/bcapps/blob/master/GEONAMES/… (a compressed file) now contains a list of the 473,322 things geonames (as of yesterday) thinks of as lakes, ponds, or reservoirs. This file gives the name (note that many lakes have the same name), geonameid (in case you want more information), latitude, longitude, body type (see github.com/barrycarter/bcapps/blob/master/GEONAMES/… for a lookup table), and country for each lake.
    – user3856
    Commented Jul 13, 2018 at 19:16

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Wikidata knows of about 240,000 lake. Here's a query that will give you the first 1000.

#List of all the lakes
SELECT ?itemLabel ?coord WHERE {
  ?item (wdt:P31/wdt:P279*) wd:Q23397.
  OPTIONAL { ?item wdt:P625 ?coord. }
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}
LIMIT 1000
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