Thanks for raising the question, Paul. First of all, I think it's important to mention that this architecture improvement is aiming for complete feature-parity and no impact on UX/UI.

Currently Tilerator supports an arbitrary list of languages through a method that is fairly hacky. It has to use this method because the underlying tilelive source doesn't support an arbitrary list of fields.
Tegola faces the same issue where you have to tell it in advance the list of field names, preventing support of arbitrary languages. How do you plan to resolve this?

You're right that we have a custom language fallback system, but it doesn't happen in the vector-tile generation pipeline, but rather during the rasterization pipeline in kartotherian through a package called babel, which happens on the fly during tile requests. This part of the infrastructure will not change in this iteration.

We do want to explore client-side rendering using maplibre-gl (a fork of mapbox-gl) and for that, we are currently exploring a solution where these custom fallbacks will be implemented in the Kartographer extension.

I also want to acknowledge your concerns regarding maplibre-gl lack of support for some language scripts and we plan to gather more data and smoke tests to understand what to expect from client-side rendering in terms of language coverage.

On Mon, Mar 22, 2021 at 6:59 PM Paul Norman <paul@paulnorman.ca> wrote:

Currently Tilerator supports an arbitrary list of languages through a method that is fairly hacky. It has to use this method because the underlying tilelive source doesn't support an arbitrary list of fields.

Tegola faces the same issue where you have to tell it in advance the list of field names, preventing support of arbitrary languages. How do you plan to resolve this?

On 2021-03-22 10:10 a.m., Erica Litrenta wrote:

Greetings,


This is a follow up from our last email some months ago. You may already have seen today's announcement from Legal about the upcoming changes to the Maps Terms of Use. Here is an extra heads-up that Wikimedia Maps are transitioning towards a more modern architecture. The first phase of this transition will be replacing Tilerator [0] with Tegola [1] as our vector tile server. This is a change in the Maps infrastructure, so there should be little to no impact to the end users’ experience.


It is important that we are able to provide software that is sustainable to support, before we can guarantee a reliable user experience. Wikimedia Maps aim to provide Wikimedia users a consistent experience contributing to and learning about geoinformation. To achieve this goal, we will empower those engineers maintaining the Wikimedia Maps infrastructure to do so with ease and low effort.


If you want to learn more, please head to mediawiki.org [2], where you will also find a Questions & Answers section.


Thanks, and take care,

Erica Litrenta (on behalf of the Product Infrastructure team)


[0] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Maps/Tilerator

[1] https://tegola.io/

[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Maps/2021_modernization_plan

--

Erica Litrenta (she/her)

Manager, Community Relations Specialists

Wikimedia Foundation 

 


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