Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Larger suggestions/Provide more maps or improve Wikimedia map with more POIs

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Provide more maps or improve Wikimedia map with more POIs

  • Problem: For many tools and also in articles there is possible to use map. Unfortunatelly, default provided Wikimedia map is too much googlish - only streets, buildings, some water and forests. No POIs. Look at these maps:
Wikimedia map, mapy.cz and openstreetmap.org

On second and third map re visible some POIs, on the left I can only guess if there is some significant building (e.g church)

  • Proposed solution: 1) Change wikimedia maps tiles and render some POIs and highlight public buildings and monuments
    2) Give possibility to choose different map - there exists many OSM renderers which are free to use.
  • Who would benefit: Anybody who uses maps on Wikimedia projects
  • More comments: Some wikis uses some derivation of MediaWiki:OSM.js, which have possibility of switching maps. But Kartographer and tools uses only wikimedia map.
  • Phabricator tickets: phab:T280460
  • Proposer: JAn Dudík (talk) 09:11, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

  • Theoretically you would let people choose between tileservers --Guerillero Parlez Moi 21:01, 11 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    Yes, the problem is Wiki size. If I remember correctly, at some point the OSM community politely asked us from reducing our use of their servers (citation unavailable ATM :D). Also, wiki tiles have the tremendous advantage of being multilingual (see ro.wp vs uk.wp Strainu (talk) 08:13, 12 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    But Wikimedia maps should have our own tile server. Rendering more features into it would be easier than trying to let people choose a different tile server, which will a.) rely on external service and make content unavailable when the external service being down, and b.) not much third party tile server can withstand the traffic of people visiting Wikipedia pages. C933103 (talk) 23:44, 15 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • I think we should use OpenStreetMap for our map. It's free, and easily editable, and everyone can contribute, just like Wikimedia. Then, the map location should be easier to guess and search for some places. Thingofme (talk) 02:55, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    The current WIkimedia map is already based on OpenStreetMaps data, just with wikimedia-specific style and host on WMF server instead of using OSM Foundation's resources. C933103 (talk) 07:50, 16 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
    On Wikipedia is sometimes possibility to switch, but on various tools (Wikishootme, Query etc.) is used only WMF map, which have few details JAn Dudík (talk) 12:22, 17 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Pretty sure this should be in Multimedia and Commons. --Izno (talk) 22:37, 18 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • You might have a look to the solution we use at German language Wikivoyage. I just have worked on the page of Cyprus village Lefkara. In the small cartographer window, the standard Wikimedia map is used, we add custom POIs. But if you go fullscreen, you can switch to different maps, e.g. Mapnik, which has the details. There is one problem, you have always to give permission to access data on an external server, that's also the reason, why you can not always use the Mapnik as background map as standard. We would love to have a selectable rendered map and if possible with selection of the language labels. Thats really a problem if open a map from a city in Israel or China, all city names, street names. etc. are in local language, my hebrew reading skills are not that good, but i have to surrender if a map from China oder Thailand opens in local language only. - Mboesch (talk) 10:33, 20 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  • Hello and thanks for taking the time to write this proposal. We reviewed this proposal as a team and have determined that this is out of scope for our team but an idea that's valid nonetheless. I am therefore moving it to the Larger Suggestions Category. Thanks again! Regards, LDelench (WMF) (talk) 15:13, 28 January 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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