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Wikimedia Maps Beta

maps.wikimedia.org

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Re: Wikimedia Maps Beta

#41

Post by mjn »

thomasfoster96 wrote: post #40
snogglethorpe wrote: post #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…

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.

OSM has a policy that the base 'name' tag should be the name used on-the-ground locally, i.e. what appears in real life on street signs, building nameplates, and so on. Plus some special considerations for multilingual areas [1]. Items can also have additional language-specific tags (name:ja, name:en, etc.), which can in principle be used by renderers to display names in the language preference of the user, e.g. to produce an all-German-label or all-English-label map, to the extent the data is present [2].

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Multilingual_names

[2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_internationalization

Re: Wikimedia Maps Beta

#42

Post by _delirium »

lacksconfidence wrote: post #37
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The official website seems to use the accent when the city name's is written in regular running text, but not when it's in all-caps or small-caps (as in the logo): http://www.sanjoseca.gov/

Re: Wikimedia Maps Beta

#44

Post by smsm42 »

robbrown451 wrote: post #31
haldean wrote: 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.

It sounds like you argue that because San Jose is bigger both by territory and by population, somehow that makes San Francisco truly bigger. However, if it's bigger in both, it only makes sense the map algorithm chooses it to display on lower resolutions. I don't think going by population density is that common.

Re: Wikimedia Maps Beta

#45

Post by unicornporn »

Funny 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?

Re: Wikimedia Maps Beta

#46

Post by guard-of-terra »

Nice 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.

Re: Wikimedia Maps Beta

#48

Post by teddyh »

unicornporn wrote: post #45

Funny 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?

I would imagine that DBpedia would have something like that: http://wiki.dbpedia.org/

Re: Wikimedia Maps Beta

#49

Post by philipn »

dogma1138 wrote: post #30

Whats the difference between this and wikimapia? Aside from wikimapia having complete maps and orthographic layers ofc...

This 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.

Re: Wikimedia Maps Beta

#50

Post by pmontra »

MichaelGG wrote: post #23

Wow, 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.

I 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?
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