10 ms·
Wikimedia Maps Beta
- niedzielski 11y agoThis will be available in the Android app too[0]. It'll debut on beta[1] first. [0] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/212922/ https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/212922/ [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia.beta https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.wikipedia....
- chippy 11y agoMore documentation here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps Including the development setup
- chrisbroadfoot 11y agoNot bad. There are some pretty bad errors on tile boundaries, though: http://i.imgur.com/ifSXs2H.png http://i.imgur.com/ifSXs2H.png https://maps.wikimedia.org/#9/21.8526/103.5901 https://maps.wikimedia.org/#9/21.8526/103.5901
- giancarlostoro 11y agoI also noticed if you zoom out all the way the map disappears.
- oneeyedpigeon 11y agoAlso, zoom isn't 'idempotent', which can be annoying.
- qntty 11y agocan you explain what you mean by this?
- oneeyedpigeon 11y agoSorry for the late reply. I suspected my description might have been on the cryptic side. I was referring to the fact that zooming in one direction, followed by the exact same amount in the other, should return you to exactly the same state; these maps don't quite (i.e. they'll sometimes put you in a different location).
- mixmastamyk 11y agoWould be nice if the farthest zoom out wasn't Mercator.
- ris 11y agoThere are many good reasons for choosing mercator, the best one being that it is mostly conformal.
- mixmastamyk 11y agoYes, while zoomed in that property is useful, zoomed out less so.
- jpatokal 11y agoYou can't really switch projections mid-zoom, because the tile coordinates wouldn't match and you'd find yourself in entirely the wrong place.
- mixmastamyk 11y agoNot a big problem when zooming out from say, North America.
- kuschku 11y agoEh, you can. You can even do actual 3D rendering in browser.
- ris 11y agoI think you need to think a little more carefully about the geometry involved.
- mixmastamyk 11y agoSounds like you need to think a little more about the use case of these maps.
- 11y ago
- cead_ite 11y agoProjected use-cases: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps/Future_Plans https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps/Future_Plans
- conductor 11y agoIs the rendering process open, and what are they using for rendering the tiles? Mapnik?
- nyuriks 11y agoEverything is completely open. We use https://github.com/kartotherian/kartotherian https://github.com/kartotherian/kartotherian which is Mapbox+Mapnik based.
- Flux159 11y agoCool! It looks like they're using leaflet and hosting their own tile server from Open Street Map data. I really like that they opened up how to connect to their tile server (thanks to chippy for the link: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps ). When I was looking at options for creating a side project with open street map data earlier I ended up using Mapquest's open data api because Google maps had API restrictions after a number of calls and it was easy to integrate with leaflet, but if I was making it again I would consider using wikimedia's option. (Fyi, the sideproject is a static site hosted at http://newsatlas.io http://newsatlas.io - it takes a news/rss feed & attempts to parse the location client side by parsing the news article's summary text and displaying the location on a map - it was written in JS with angular and leaflet as dependencies - hosted on S3).
- philipn 11y agoIn case you're wondering what this is about: the scale of Wikipedia makes it difficult to just drop in a third-party OSM tiling service, so they're rolling their own map rendering process using OSM data. This is a beta of the rendered tiles, displayed inside Leaflet. If you're into maps and this kind of thing, I highly recommend checking out LocalWiki (https://localwiki.org https://localwiki.org) too!
- voltagex_ 11y agoIs their rendering process documented anywhere?
- emw 11y agoYes. From https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps#Production_maps_cluster https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps#Production_maps_cluster: The implementation [1] has various components including: * Kartotherian [2]: a server capable of providing map tiles in vector (pbf) or raster (png) formats, as well as static map snapshots of any size for a given location. * Tilerator [3]: a distributed backend tile generation service with a jobque * A flexible sources [4] system to set up the needed storage and processing pipeline 1. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps/Tile_server_implementation https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps/Tile_server_implementati... 2. https://github.com/kartotherian/kartotherian/ https://github.com/kartotherian/kartotherian/ 3. https://github.com/kartotherian/tilerator/ https://github.com/kartotherian/tilerator/ 4. https://github.com/kartotherian/kartotherian-core/ https://github.com/kartotherian/kartotherian-core/
- jpatokal 11y agoNice effort, but still needs a lot of work. This view of the western US picks out four coastal cities worthy of mention: "Tijuana" (fine), "Los Angele" (sic!), "San Jose" (err..) and "Calgary" (wat). No San Francisco, no Seattle, no Vancouver... https://maps.wikimedia.org/#4/40.15/-93.38 https://maps.wikimedia.org/#4/40.15/-93.38 Scripts are also all over the place. Japan is Japanese only, China is Chinese only, India is English, Bangladesh is Bengali, Pakistan is partly Urdu and English, the Arab countries are totally inconsistent...
- chc 11y agoSeems worth noting, it does have the right name for Los Angeles — the label is just running into Phoenix.
- xnyhps 11y agoLooks like a boundary between tiles there: https://maps.wikimedia.org/osm-intl/4/2/6.png https://maps.wikimedia.org/osm-intl/4/2/6.png https://maps.wikimedia.org/osm-intl/4/3/6.png https://maps.wikimedia.org/osm-intl/4/3/6.png Placing labels on a map is quite a hard problem, especially when certain tiles are refreshed.
- sehugg 11y agoI'm guessing it's because San Jose and Calgary have over 1M population -- the cities of SFO and Seattle proper do not.
- haldean 11y agoIf you're going on population, San Jose is the biggest city in the Bay Area; in that sense, it makes sense to pick it as the "one that wins" in a very dense area. Calgary is around 1M people and Tijuana is 1.3M, while Seattle and Vancouver are each around 600k. Those choices seem pretty reasonable to me.
- robbrown451 11y agoSan Jose is bigger than San Francisco only because its city limits occupy far more area. San Francisco is a bigger population center.
- lifeisstillgood 11y agoI have tried one or two Google Maps mashups, but never bothered seriously because its ... Well not worth the effort learning on my free time how to use something that is not free. But openstreetmap and Wikipedia - how can I resist. Ok folks, let's look at this properly - you are going to get my donation this time round, and in five years google will look worried and in ten the goto mapping solution will be a free Wikipedia service. Open always wins in the end.
- voltagex_ 11y agoI wonder if they're going to funnel contributions back to OSM.
- Doctor_Fegg 11y agoThey're not inviting separate contributions. There's no edit tab. If you want to edit these maps, you need to edit OSM.
- MichaelGG 11y agoWow, it's so refreshing after using Google Maps. Wikimedia Maps are just fast. Reminds me of how I remember Google Maps being. (My machine is much faster now, but GMaps just _lags_.) The data quality is a bit weird, as if it doesn't know what things to highlight. But I'm sure this will improve over time.
- pmontra 11y agoI was about to comment that it is so slow to be unusable (seconds before tiles appear after zooming in) but apparently it's not the same for everybody. Or HN or some other site are slashdotting the tile server rigth now?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- emw 11y agoI am pumped about this, especially the Wikimedia Commons use cases described at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps/Future_Plans#Commons https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps/Future_Plans#Commons. There are actually already ways to browse Commons images on a map, but they need significant work. For example, the tile at [1] depicts an area with easily 20 geotagged Commons images, but, inexplicably, none of them are shown until you zoom in another level. Or, zoom out to see the entire state, only to see Massachusetts shown as completely lacking any geotagged Commons images [2]. There is a ton of potential for awesome applications involving geotagged images and geographic maps. I'm glad to see the Wikimedia Foundation stepping up its investment here. 1. https://tools.wmflabs.org/wiwosm/osm-on-ol/commons-on-osm.php?zoom=16&lat=42.64225&lon=-71.30984&layers=B00TFT https://tools.wmflabs.org/wiwosm/osm-on-ol/commons-on-osm.ph... 2. https://tools.wmflabs.org/wiwosm/osm-on-ol/commons-on-osm.php?zoom=8&lat=42.64225&lon=-71.30435&layers=B00TFT https://tools.wmflabs.org/wiwosm/osm-on-ol/commons-on-osm.ph...
- dogma1138 11y agoWhats the difference between this and wikimapia? Aside from wikimapia having complete maps and orthographic layers ofc...
- philipn 11y agoThis isn't (or ever really directly indented to be) any kind of generic mapping service, or a map-driven interface for Wikipedia. Wikimapia (and other services!) provide interfaces for that. This is the first draft of a tile service that may be integrated into different spots throughout the project -- not an alternative to those kinds of things. It's basically just because Wikipedia can't use a tile service like the default OSM mapnik server without totally crashing it, so they need to build their own tile rendering pipeline, etc.
- UserRights 11y ago* Under what license is the data published at wikimapia? * Where can I download the data? * [How] can I use it for my own website?
- dogma1138 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiMapia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiMapia Creative Commons, they have an API if you want to consume the data.
- jarboot 11y agoSeems extremely fast, and actually has a lot more information about my university than google maps!
- snogglethorpe 11y agoOne thing I found neat about this was that (at least by default) it seems language-neutral: scrolling around the world, labels over the U.S. are in English, labels in Japan are in Japanese, Korea, in Korean, China, in simplified Chinese, etc. Not even any romanized (or otherwise translated/transliterated) labels in parentheses. Just the native presentation. Granted that for practicality, you probably also want a mode that makes the labels more useful for a reader that may not understand every writing system, but as a default (when the user doesn't express a language preference), there's something very satisfying about this method of presentation... In my mind it reflects Wikipedia's aspirations of being a useful tool for the whole world....
- dalke 11y ago> but as a default (when the user doesn't express a language preference), I understand your viewpoint, and think it's noble. But you might want to tweak your parenthetical comment. In practice, I and most others do express a default language preference, which is sent as part of the browser's HTTP request. In my case it's: Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5 which means it's ignoring my preference. And I'm fine with that. Language is a mess. Look at Switzerland, which is labeled with all four official languages, or the three languages of Belgium. Yet South Africa, which has 11 official languages (and 11 official names - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_names_of_South_Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_names_of_South_Africa ) is labeled only in English.
- MildlySerious 11y agoBeing the edge case of internet users with a different default language than what my geolocation would result in, I know how frustrating it is to expect one language, and get another one "tailored" to you in order to "improve" user experience. However, in this specific case I agree with the parent commenter. While the preferred language should affect the UI so you can interact with the map, I feel like in this case translating the content right away could take away from the experience and is not necessarily what the language flag should mean. It shouldn't be more than a click away, though.
- nyuriks 11y agoThanks for all your support! Means a lot. Clipped labels is a big issue, working on it. Any help is welcome with bugs and styling. Info is at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps . Will post updates on twitter @nyuriks. Thanks!
- unicornporn 11y agoFunny thing, the other day I was looking for a good map of all Wikipedia articles with geo positional data. I didn't really find one. Looking at the title of this submission, I hoped that it would offer this. However, it seems it does not. Does anybody know if it ever will?
- teddyh 11y agoI would imagine that DBpedia would have something like that: http://wiki.dbpedia.org/ http://wiki.dbpedia.org/
- guard-of-terra 11y agoNice color gamma - less like OSM's rainbow and more like Yandex or Naver maps. I wonder why Google insist on indecipherable shades of gray. Some things would benefit from more contrast, but as it happens, almost all map services would.
- buro9 11y agoI really like the colour selections. But it seems to me that the designation of green space is off. Kew Gardens comes out as a built-up area: https://maps.wikimedia.org/#16/51.4778/-0.2975 https://maps.wikimedia.org/#16/51.4778/-0.2975
- okasaki 11y agoThis is going to be a great enhancement. The maps in Wikipedia articles always seemed very lacking to me.
- jevgeni 11y agoCrimean names are in Russian. :/
- pluma 11y agoNobody told you? Oh.
- jevgeni 11y agoYou mean of the Russian occupation?
- guard-of-terra 11y agoWhatever you may think of Crimea status, people in Crimea use Russian language dominantly. Why would you expect names not be in it? This sort of behavior you're demonstrating is exactly what contributed to recent Ukraine troubles. P. S. In Italy, cities in Sudtirol - Alto Adige marked in both German and Italian. That's responsible behavior if you want examples.
- jevgeni 11y agoRecent Ukrainian troubles were mostly caused by, oh I dunno, a foreign army invading? > marked in both German and Italian. both
- 11y ago
- estefan 11y agoThe colour scheme is far more legible than open street map. I wish they'd change their styling...
- Doctor_Fegg 11y agoOSM's default road colouring is actually about to change: https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/1736 https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/173...
- torrent-of-ions 11y agoThe default mapnik render on osm.org is meant to be for editors rather than map users. For using the map it's often better to use other renders.
- infinity0 11y agoThis is incredible, it's about 2x as fast as OSM over tor and about 10x as fast as Google Maps.
- electricblue 11y agoLooks like they are having some problems with caching. Many labels in major cities are cut off. Caching is hard, especially when you aren't using an out-of-the-box product like ESRI