<map> wiki syntax

The wiki has supported a syntax for quite a while now. Something of the form…
lat=51.485|lon=-0.15|z=11|w=300|h=200|format=jpeg
…creates a map image appearing on the wiki page.

This has been available since the London Hack Day when we deployed my mediawiki extension

But I didn’t really put together some kind of wiki policy on how and when it should be used. Should we systematically use it across all the place pages? Many conventionally uploaded wiki images are growing out of date, showing mapping progress from a long time ago. These images are better (in most situations) since they always show an up-to-date tiles@home rendering. Should we go on a mission to delete all the old map images?

Hopefully it will happen gradually anyway. I thought I’d promote awareness of this facility, by sticking maps on some pages which don’t have them. I’ve started with some top level country project pages (listed on
Mapping Projects) I put maps on these pages for all of South America and Asia. It’s also nice to put more content on some of these unloved country pages where we badly need to attract new contributors.

…but these zoomed out tiles@home map images are often a little odd. They get screwed up due to coastline problems for example. It’s a big wiki editing task to add s onto lower level place pages. Feel free to help!

I think a lot of places using image that could use are pages using Template:Place. Modifing that template to allow a or an image would probably be a good place to start. There is also the Creating_city_pages article that describes how to use the template. I don’t know enough about templates to do that myself.

Well I thought about modifying Template:Place to show a , but it would require some sneaky jiggery pokery to get that to work, and I’m not sure if it would work that well unless we added more parameters (even more!) to control width and height (some places like Chile have funny dimensions)

I did recently modify Template:Place such that the ‘image’ parameter is now optional. This is quite nice because it gives freeform freedom to do what you like at the top left of the page. Including using a instead of a static image for the main image appearing at the top of the page e.g. Rijswijk …or not having any image at all.