Andre Engels wrote:
On [[en:Talk:James Cook]] someone asked for a map of
his travels. I could
make such, but I would like to have a map to start from. Are there somewhere
maps available that can be used for cases like this? Would it be an idea to
have a map collection somewhere on Wikipedia to work from?
If you check [[User:Morwen]]'s contribution history on the en: wiki,
he's been contributing literally thousands of maps of counties and
provinces and whatnot. I believe he mostly traces the outlines from
maps in books, which isn't a copyright violation since it's just
reproducing the factual information (a standard map projection of
geographical data). Then he does shading and so on in an image-editing
program.
Ideally we would simply import a lot of GIS data and auto-generate maps
based on it ("i want a mercatur projection from this latitude/longitude
to this latitude/longitude, with cities over 1m people labeled), but
auto-generated maps, at least with freely-available software,
unfortunately look pretty terrible. There's a few scattered around on
Wikipedia, though I can't seem to find one at the moment, and they all
look like the sort of thing you might have expected a computer-generated
map to look like circa 1982.
-Mark