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Wikimedia Maps Beta

maps.wikimedia.org

31–40 of 84 posts

Re: Wikimedia Maps Beta

#31
post #26

Nice 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 Scripts are also all over the place. Japan is Japanese only, China is Chinese only, India is English, Bangladesh is Bengali, Pakist…

If 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.

San Jose is bigger than San Francisco only because its city limits occupy far more area. San Francisco is a bigger population center.

Re: Wikimedia Maps Beta

#32
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 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.

San Jose is bigger than San Francisco only because its city limits occupy far more area. San Francisco is a bigger population center.

…do you live in San Francisco?

Re: Wikimedia Maps Beta

#34
post #26

Nice 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 Scripts are also all over the place. Japan is Japanese only, China is Chinese only, India is English, Bangladesh is Bengali, Pakist…

If 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.

Is the e in San Jose, California really accented? (It shows up as San José for me.)

Re: Wikimedia Maps Beta

#36
One 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....

Re: Wikimedia Maps Beta

#37
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 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.

Is the e in San Jose, California really accented? (It shows up as San José for me.)

It's optional I suppose. I'm not aware of any official city documents that use it, but it has historical roots.

> California Governor Felipe de Neve established the first civilian town or pueblo in California on November 29, 1777. Founded near the southern end of San Francisco Bay, it was christened El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe.

[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20080218051828/http://www.califor...

Re: Wikimedia Maps Beta

#39
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If 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.

San Jose is bigger than San Francisco only because its city limits occupy far more area. San Francisco is a bigger population center.

>San Francisco

>Population

>City and county 852,469

>Metro 4,594,060

>CSA 8,607,423

>

>San Jose

>Population

>City 1,015,785

>Metro 1,952,872

>CSA 8,607,423

Colloquially, "population" refers to either the metropolitan area population or the CSA population, or something in between. But since different countries have different concepts and definitions for "metro area", it can't be relied on for a global map. The only thing remotely portable in this case is "how many people live within the city limits". And by that measure, San Jose is indeed bigger than San Francisco. San Francisco doesn't even get a mention because its population within city limits is below one million - the cut-off line.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose,_California

Re: Wikimedia Maps Beta

#40

One 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…

This is probably not intentional - the data is from OpenStreetMap, and if you have a look at http://www.openstreetmap.org/ you'll see that there isn't an attempt to make all labels the same language.
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