WMDE Technical Wishes/Geoinformation/Maki icons

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T145475

In Kartographer maps, you can use Maki icons on markers for common points of interest. See mw:Help:Extension:Kartographer/Icons for the full list of all available icons.

Status and next steps

The maki icons were updated on all wikis on September 20, 2022

Problems

In the past,

• several icons weren’t working, e.g. castle, mountain, stadium;
• other helpful icons were not available in the icon set;
• the meaning of some existing icons was not very clear.

Solution

As a first step, the Technical Wishes team updated the Maki icon set used in the Wikimedia projects to a newer version, from 0.5.0 to 7.0.0. This brings the following changes:

• All icons have been updated, for clarity and to make them work better in international contexts.
• Comparison: icons Maki 0.5 vs. icons Maki 7.2
• The appearance of the icons has been improved (contrast, size)
• About 100 new icons have been added (expand to get the full list)

New icons

amusement-park, aquarium, arrow bank-JP, barrier, bbq, beach, bicycle-share, blood-bank, bowling-alley, bridge, building-alt1 car-rental, car-repair, casino, castle-JP, castle, caution, cemetery-JP, charging-station, college-JP, communications-tower, confectionery, construction, convenience defibrillator, diamond, doctor, drinking-water elevator, entrance-alt1 fence, ferry-JP, fire-station-JP, fitness-centre, florist, furniture gaming, garden-centre, gate, globe hardware, highway-rest-area, historic, home, horse-riding, hospital-JP, hotspring information jewelry-store karaoke landmark-JP, landmark, liftgate, lighthouse-JP monument-JP, mountain observation-tower, optician paint, park-alt1, picnic-site, police-JP, post-JP racetrack-boat, racetrack-cycling, racetrack-horse, racetrack, rangerstation, recycling, religious-buddhist, religious-shinto, residential-community, restaurant-bbq, restaurant-noodle, restaurant-pizza, restaurant-seafood, restaurant-sushi, road-accident school-JP, shelter, shoe, skateboard, slipway, snowmobile, stadium table-tennis, teahouse, tollbooth, tunnel veterinary, viewpoint, volcano, volleyball watch, waterfall, watermill, wheelchair, windmill

• All available icons and their names can be found on Mw:Help:Extension:Kartographer/Icons

Differences between Maki 0.5 and Maki 7.2

Icons that don't exist in Maki 7.2

A few icons from Maki 0.5 don’t exist in 7.2. For maps with these icons, the following alternatives will be shown automatically:

0.5	7.2	Icon that will be shown
chemist	no longer exists	pharmacy
london-underground	no longer exists	rail-metro
minefield	no longer exists	danger
oil-well	no longer exists	industry
polling-place	no longer exists	post
rail-above	no longer exists	rail
rail-underground	no longer exists	rail-metro

Icons with different names in Maki 7.2

In Maki 7.2, a few icons have a different name than they had in the old icon set. Maps using the old name will automatically show the new icon instead:

0.5	7.2
america-football	new spelling: american-football
camera	renamed to: attraction
disability	renamed to: wheelchair
emergency-telephone	new spelling: emergency-phone
industrial	new spelling: industry
land-use	new spelling: landuse
mobilephone	new spelling: mobile-phone
park	There are two types of park now: park shows a decidious tree (like maple) park-alt1 shows a coniferous tree (like pine)
toilets	new spelling: toilet

A little glimpse into what was necessary to make this small change

• The maki icon library was outdated by 7 years. In order to update the library to the new version, we had to rebuild the whole tool (makizushi) that draws the markers from the SVG library (create PNG, add pin markers, background color).
• Rendering the new icons to fit the same space as the old icons took some fine-tuning.
• We rebuilt the way alphanumeric markers were generated. Before, they were being clipped out of a master art board. Now, the SVGs can be generated dynamically from Javascript. This makes styling improvements much simpler in the future.
• Unlike the old icons, the new icons did not come with black outlines. We were concerned that white images on light-colored marker backgrounds would be hard to see. So we used accessibility guidelines to determine when a light or dark icon would provide the best visual contrast, and switch between the two at a calculated threshold.
• A few icons from Maki 0.5 were no longer included in Maki 7.2. We did some research on the meaning of the old icons, to find the best new icons for each old name.
• To update the help page on mediawiki.org, we wrote a Lua module which shows all icons on a map, and produces a list view of the icon names which can be annotated with local translations or descriptions.