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Wikimedia Maps Beta

maps.wikimedia.org

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Re: Wikimedia Maps Beta

#61

Post by dalke »

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…

> 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 ) is labeled only in English.

Re: Wikimedia Maps Beta

#63

Post by guard-of-terra »

jevgeni wrote: post #53

Crimean names are in Russian. :/

Whatever 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.

Re: Wikimedia Maps Beta

#65

Post by 7952 »

haldean wrote: post #26
jpatokal wrote: post #13

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.

But you shouldn't just pick it based on some statistical measure only. Maps are supposed to be a useful tool, and that should consider the cultural importance of a place.

Re: Wikimedia Maps Beta

#67

Post by technomancy »

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 doesn't seem to be true consistently FWIW; in Thailand the city I looked at had the city name in Thai (แม่สอด) but the street names romanized. Some other city names are romanized as well.
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