Tim, I was very excited to get your email! I somehow missed Simon's
efforts, and I think it would be a great idea for all of us to sync up
(perhaps via hangout?)
I have recently submitted Kartographer
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Kartographer> extension (code
<https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-Kartographer>) for
security review, and I hope we could deploy it at least to Wikivoyage
fairly soon. Kartographer eventually should allow readers to see and
interact with the map just like Graph examples
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph/Demo#Vega_2.0_Interactive_Ex…>
.
Kartographer uses mabox.js library <https://github.com/mapbox/mapbox.js/>,
which includes Leaflet. Using mapbox.js will allow editors to add styled
GeoJSON <https://github.com/mapbox/simplestyle-spec/tree/master/1.1.0> directly
to wikipedia pages - example
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Kartographer#Usage_Ideas>. Also
worth mentioning is the new feature
<https://github.com/kartotherian/kartotherian/blob/master/README.md#markers> I
added to Kartotherian - an ability to generate pushpin images of any Maki
symbol in any color (example
<https://maps.wikimedia.org/v4/marker/pin-l-rail-metro+007800@2x.png>).
Kartographer should allow editors to customize map for each article. The
big remaining issue is the server-side rendering - we can already generate
static images, but we must be able to generate them with the extra GeoJSON
layers. It seems leaflet/mapbox.js do not support node.js headless
rendering. I saw the leaflet-headless
<https://github.com/jieter/leaflet-headless> project, but it might require
some work to use it with mapbox.js. So any help with this would be great.
Now to the points from your email:
* Style goals task <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T113912> is open, we
should discuss how to work on it
* Transportation POIs was a request from Wikivoyage community. I feel they
should be at least reduced in size and restyled - should be easy enough
using Mapbox Studio, but I am very bad at visual designing - any patches
are welcome.
* Mobile Android app just added maps, but they use the base layer plus add
pushpins for Wikipedia articles. Eventually I hope they will be able to
show maps as part of the articles, with the extra layers.
* Simon map is an awesome effort, and we should figure out how to bring it
from wmflabs to production - otherwise we won't be able to use it for
Wikipedia traffic - the virtual servers won't be able to support it, and it
is not safe from security perspective.
* Multilingual maps are a huge request, so seriously doubt it in 2 months.
WMDE has graciously offered one of their engineers, Johannes, to work on
Mapnik. He already fixed a very long standing RTL font rendering bug, and
hopefully he will be able to figure out how to add HSTORE storage to
Mapnik. Once done, it will be simple to add all languages to the vector
tiles, and to pick what to render at the last second.
* We cannot show maps to any Wikipedia users as part of the articles
because we don't have the server capacity for that yet. But, you can easily
switch the geohack template (GPS coords in the upper right corner) to use
our new maps, just like ruwiki did, by modifying GeoTemplate
<https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A8%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%BD:GeoTempl…>
and GeoHack.js <https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:GeoHack.js> (these
are ruwiki, but you can do the same for dewiki, enwiki, etc). As always,
this is up to the community and not WMF, thus I didn't do it myself.
Switching ruwiki geohack quadrupled our traffic
<http://searchdata.wmflabs.org/maps/>. But geohack is obviously a stopgap
measure - once we have more capacity, I hope we can use Kartographer
extension on all Wikipedias.
* I'm fairly happy with the performance - all maps are served via 2 varnish
caching servers + 4 backend servers. For full production, we will need 4
varnish servers in each of the 4 data centers. That should significantly
improve performance for many regions.
* A still big open question is how to add large external databases to
Wikipedia. OSM database required huge efforts, but we shouldn't have to do
this every time we add a new db. No solution for this yet. One option is
to set up a well understood API on your database, and let Kartographer pick
up that data?
* We already generate a un-labeled map (use /osm/ instead of /osm-intl/ ) -
this can help with label collusion.
* Priorities is a great question :) This quarter we were primarily
concentrating on community feedback and adaption - which has been going
great (maps on android, geo hack, wikivoyage). The next quarter we should
start doing more integration and expansion, assuming we can get our hands
on some servers.
== What can you help with ==
* Design a new better map Wikipedia-specific style
* Design a new better WebGL map Wikipedia-specific style
* Help improve SQL for vector tile generation (many bugs there)
* Help making mapbox.js run in node.js
* Gather and outline maps usage scenarios (product manager role)
* Expose your data via an API, and consume it via Kartographer
* Add more capabilities to Kartographer, e.g. spinning globe, etc
* Something else?
Ping me with any questions or ideas!
On Sat, Dec 12, 2015 at 9:17 PM, Tim Alder <tim(a)alder-digital.de> wrote:
> Hello Yuri,
> I'm glad that Simon (in CC) starts to create a new leaflet-version of
> the map that we want to include inside Wikipedia [1]. Daniel Schwen is
> in CC as developer of the WikiMiniAtlas.
>
> I believe the most things we can do in a community-driven process, but
> there are some things where the WMF can perhaps help:
> *Some design advice for Simon's map would be nice. What do you think
> about the map? (The interactive Icons and the background map have to
> work together, in the moment are e.g. the train station icons on the
> background in the same color space like the icon above. Perhaps you can
> re-color the train station or remove them. Especial the tram stations
> seems not so important for me and could be removed in my eyes.)
> *What features should we really have?
> *What can we do to be usable in the mobile Wikipedia version or the app?
> *What's the status of multilingual map tiles. Is there a chance to have
> it available in 2 months or so?
> *We know that only a promile of the Wikipedia-readers are using the map.
> Do you see a chance that we get some advertising for it. I mean a larger
> icon or for some time a little hint or a pop-up of the map for some
> percent of the readers or so could help.
>
> How happy are you in the moment with the render stack and the servers?
> Do you think there will some problems with the performance to deliver
> tiles?
>
> My Wikipedia-coordinates are in the Toollabs-OSM-database "gis" in
> tables "wp_coords_red0", for each request I generate a new Geojson for
> individual window of view. Do you think it would make more sense to try
> to reder this data in vector tiles? Compared with OSM this data volume
> is so little that we don't need hstore for it. I believe the benefit
> could be to avoid collisions with other label and make it more
> consistent during panning the map. It could be also interesting to
> really render the labels in each different language as clickable labels.
> What do you think? Could you help with rendering?
>
> Did WMF change the priorities for maps?
>
> Best regards,
> Tim alias Kolossos
>
> [1]
> https://tools.wmflabs.org/wiwosm/osm-gadget-leaflet/#/?lang=de&article=Berl…
> Github:
> https://github.com/simon04/osm-gadget-leaflet/
>
I can't believe there isn't a report for this, anyway I filed
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T120809
Blocks:
T92535: Exclude {{location map}} images from PageImages
T70008: PDF-related improvements needed at Wikivoyage, especially
for dynamic maps
T32702: PDF export extension problem with <div style="position:>
and any location templates
T52714: VisualEditor: Location map template does not display correctly
T64572: Media Viewer and location map overlays
Nemo
