Maps great, yes. Here's what *I* think Wikipedia needs. First and foremost, OSM is a database, just like Wikipedia articles are data (don't get me started). It's a foreign database, which means that you have the foreign key problem. Wikipedia articles all have a published unique name. Perfect for a foreign key. Articles can get moved, but in the ordinary course of editing, they don't. In OSM, the key "wikipedia" is used to make reference to a Wikipedia article. It can be the full URL, or simply the article name (latter is recommended). http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:wikipedia for details.

Linking to OpenStreetMap entities, on the other hand, is somewhat more abstract.  OSM entities (nodes, ways, and relations, all fruitful for Wikipedia linking) have a database ID. The trouble that the ID is only as persistent as the database entry, which can change through as simple a change as adding a bridge to a road (one database entry becomes three -- the original, a new short one which is the bridge, and the remainder of the road, as a new way). Probably the most persistent way to link to an entity is to give a lat/lon of a node, and give the name of the node. That is enough information to recover from any editing (if the node gets moved or deleted, there be congruent nodes nearby, and if the name is changed, you still have the node's location). Particularly if the entity has a Wikipedia article name; a bot can audit both databases against each other.

Wikipedia currently has only points in articles. At most you can say "The subject of this article is at this point." which is insufficient if the point is an area (in OSM, a self-terminating way), a way (e.g. road, railroad, river), or a relation (a collection of related ways, e.g. a lake and its islands, or a bus route). The Wikiuniverse could reinvent OSM's system for identifying places, or it could bite the bullet, lean more heavily on OSM's data, and make article references into explicit OSM references. Note that these references would not be OSM specific -- any map is going to have lat/lon and names of entities. It's just that the Wikipedia editor that helps make these links would use OSM lat/lons and names.

Then, once Wikipedia articles can make reference to OSM objects, and you have a OSM-derived Wikimedia-hosted set of map tiles, then including a dynamic map in an article is simply a matter of a single command. And an article which is a collection of articles can make a map with references to those articles, again, with a single command.

And .... here's the money shot: your location gets shown on the map.

BTW, Special:Nearby is broken. Android phone, Chrome Browser, GPS on and locked (Ingress is happy), "Quiet out here ... there weren't any pages found nearby." Yet I could throw a stone and hit the location of a page AND my Google Glass app is happy to report that a page is very close to me.


On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 4:55 PM, Arthur Richards <arichards@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Somehow wikitech-l got dropped form the recipient list of this thread; I know some of the OSM folks are subscribed. Anyway, re-added wikitech-l to this thread.


On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 1:53 PM, Jon Robson <jdlrobson@gmail.com> wrote:

Sounds like a good idea. If there is no objections to my potentially crazy idea I will drop them a note on their mailing list...

On 7 Mar 2014 13:27, "Arthur Richards" <arichards@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Dunno if any of the OSM-y folks are planning to attend but I bet this would be up their alley. At the very least, it would probably be good to get their input on a project like this.


On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 11:44 AM, Jon Robson <jdlrobson@gmail.com> wrote:
Dan awesome! Glad there is some interest - this should be a lot of fun! :-)

On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 1:20 PM, Quim Gil <qgil@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> fyi
>
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: [WikimediaMobile] Zurich Hackathon: Creating a map namespace
> Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2014 12:54:52 -0800
> From: Jon Robson <jdlrobson@gmail.com>
> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org>, mobile-l
> <mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
>
> This may be extremely ambitious, but I'm keen to kick off development
> around the creation of a map namespace during the Zurich hackathon.
>
> The goal would be to setup an editable map namespace that could be
> used for a variety of things, one of which would be adding a map view
> to the Special:Nearby page provided via the mobile site. The goal is a
> proof of concept not necessarily anything production ready (but that
> would be great if we could get to that point!)
>
> Please let me know if you would also be interested on hacking such a
> thing -
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Z%C3%BCrich_Hackathon_2014/Geo_Namespace
> - or if doing so would be a terrible idea (but if you have to go down
> that route please provide constructive reasoning on what would be a
> less terrible idea)
>
> Excited to hack on cool things in Zurich!
>
> _______________________________________________
> Mobile-l mailing list
> Mobile-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mobile-l
>
>
>



--
Jon Robson
* http://jonrobson.me.uk
* https://www.facebook.com/jonrobson
* @rakugojon

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--
Arthur Richards
Software Engineer, Mobile
[[User:Awjrichards]]
IRC: awjr



--
Arthur Richards
Software Engineer, Mobile
[[User:Awjrichards]]
IRC: awjr

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