Today the Wikimedia Foundation is announcing the deprecation of the public
API for Wikimedia map tiles. Around mid October the Foundation will end
support for the Wikimedia Maps Service API [1]. This change affects people
using Wikimedia maps on their own website or app. Maps on the Wikimedia
sites, in Wikimedia-hosted tools and gadgets, and on maps.wikimedia.org
won't be affected.
This decision was made based on recent outage incidents, primarily due to
spikes in third party usage, along with an analysis showing that more than
a third of maps provided are to non-Wikimedia services (including many to
for-profit organizations).
After the most recent incident [2], the service was limited so that only
cached maps tiles would be available. While this protected the servers, it
made the service unpredictable and highlighted the unsustainability of our
tile service. So, we have made the decision to discontinue the maps APIs
for non-Wikimedia users.
This change will allow our teams working on Maps to focus on the
sustainability of the maps used within Wikimedia projects.
You can follow the implementation of this change on Phabricator [3].
Best,
Erica Litrenta
[1] https://maps.wikimedia.org/osm-intl/
[2] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation/20200204-maps
[3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T261424
--
Erica Litrenta
Manager, Community Relations Specialists
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Elitre_(WMF)