Wikimedia Maps

Wikimedia is lately deeply involved in maps using OSM data and this year seems to be pretty busy in this regard:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Map_improvements_2018

Their style is very light and I like it in general:

https://maps.wikimedia.org

It’s not perfect of course, for example I feel that transport icons could have unified size while being more diverse in shapes (and initial zoom levels) to avoid mess like this:

https://maps.wikimedia.org/#14/48.8649/2.3304

Another interesting thing is that they plan to render tiles for different languages. Currently there are ~300 Wikipedia language versions, so I’m curious if they plan to deal with rendering all of them. Current state of internationalized maps is beta - there are few countries picked for testing and you can see how they look like for your language:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/naveenpf/diary/43689

at least I was able to see Polish names using “forged” URL:

https://maps-beta.wmflabs.org/?lang=pl#4/42.33/12.52

The Brighmed issue tracker is located here, you can log in with the Wikimedia account:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/view/1633/

A lot of interesting activities related to rendering of OSM data.

Next phase of localization - wider testing:

https://test2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_internationalization_examples (slippy maps)
https://test.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_internationalization_examples (static maps)

It’s easy to add your own language and map location for testing. Read more about it and how the language fallback rules are defined:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Map_improvements_2018#Project_Updates
https://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translatewiki.net_languages#Fallback_language_.28MediaWiki.29

Now they started including them on the project Wikis:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps#Wikimedia_projects_that_have_Maps_enabled

Since maps can use different languages, soon we will face the problem of adding localized names for countries and places (fortunately, their style currently uses just few types of labels). It would be good to prepare step-by-step guide to help them to resolve this issue:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T193656

It would be important for us to make Wikimedians understand how to do it properly to avoid low quality Wikidata name imports.

Blog entry about introducing new maps:

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/06/28/interactive-maps-now-in-your-language/

Unfortunately currently Wikimedia Maps won’t be actively maintained, and even latest release was done just by popular demand, out of schedule, but the plan is to get back to them after some time, especially if upvoted during Wishlist Survey this fall:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Maps/Status_of_map_styles

Community Wishlist Survey 2019 is already there with some maps improvements propositions:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2019/Miscellaneous/Wikimedia_Maps_Improvements
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2019/Miscellaneous/Improved_style_and_internationalized_labels_in_Wikimedia_Maps

You can vote till 30.11:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2019#schedule
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2019/Maps/Maps_Improvements:_Vector_Structure,_Disputed_Borders,_Cleaner_Style