[Foundation-l] Proposal for a new project: Wikipedia Historical Atlas

[Erik Moeller]

Menchi:

> The only obstacle to this project is actually writing the software.

:-)

First of all, I'm not convinced this needs to be a separate project 
anymore than we need WikiTimelines. A historical map that is useful, 
animated or not, can already be added to a Wikipedia article on the topic.

As for the technical implementation, it is certainly not impossible -- 
there are free maps available, and an EasyTimeline-like extension where 
you could say

<infomap>
country=Germany
values(government)=
"CDU/CSU",black
"SPD",red
government(Bavaria)=CDU/CSU
government(Berlin)=SPD
..
</infomap>

and so on, with a decent backend of countries, states and cities (based 
on PD maps), and other parameters, like relations between map elements, 
could certainly be useful. But unless such a scripting language already 
exists, we're talking about a major implementation effort.

As an interim solution, I suggest lobbying for SVG support on the 
Wikimedia sites, which is still held up by security considerations. In 
combination with my External Editor tool, this would allow relatively 
easy editing of maps for purposes like this, though not with any level 
of standardization.

Erik