James,
I was trying to think if there was a way to do this with the
interactive Wikimedia maps. You'd need some way to extract the
bounding boxes. If they are stored in OSM or Wikidata it looks like
that might be possible programmatically with the current software. [0]
Otherwise it looks like a more manual process. :/
I'm afraid I'm not super savvy in this area, but maybe some of this
might be helpful?
[0] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:Kartographer#GeoShapes_via_Wi…
Yours,
Chris Koerner
Community Liaison
Wikimedia Foundation
Hi All,
One other thing I was wondering: on Commons, is there a way to show the
collection of bounding boxes on a Wikimap, for a category of images that
use the "Map" description template, which can include such information.
What I've got in mind is a category like
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:MC_map_migration_test_set
all of which's images use the Map template and have bounding box
information.
I hoped that this might be displayable via the Template:GeoGroupTemplate
at the top of the category page, but no deal.
Ideally, it would be nice to be able to put a template on the top of a
category page; pick up the bounding-box information from all of the map
descriptions, and display the results on a Wikimap.
This would be particularly useful for examining the contents of
categories like
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Goad_fire_insurance_maps_of_Lee…
where the individual maps form part of a systematic arrangement; but it
would also be useful for categories of old maps generally.
An earlier method (before the Map template) was to explicitly specify
corners for the bounding box, which the GeoGroup template /can/ pick up,
as for example for
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Ordnance_Survey_Drawings
However, by plotting push-pins rather than bounding boxes, this ends up
a rather overcrowded mess, that is difficult to interpret. Bounding
boxes would be a lot better, by making it a lot clearer as to which
points are linked with which.
Does anybody know if perhaps it is already possible to do this?
Or, alternatively, would creating and adapting templates to achieve this
be a lot of work, or should it be relatively straightforward?
Thanks in advance,
Best regards,
James Heald.
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Hi everybody,
I am trying to prepare some batches of maps for upload to Commons, from
some of the images uploaded by the British Library to Flickr that have
now been georeferenced; but I have got some questions, and I could also
use some help, particularly with adding names/titles to maps on the BL
georeferencer that don't have them.
An overview page for the project can be found at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:British_Library/Mechanical_Curat…
Here's a more detailed post I sent earlier today to the Wikimaps group
on Facebook. Apologies for the cross-posting, but I wasn't sure where
the best place was to send it to, for the right people to see it:
-----
People may remember that three years ago we found and tagged over
50,000 maps and plans in the million images uploaded to Flickr by the
British Library. Since then, over half the maps have now been
georeferenced on the BL's Georeferencer. It would be good to start
getting some of the maps uploaded to WikiCommons. Starting with the UK
I've therefore created pages for a dozen proposed initial batches to
upload,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:MC_upload_prep_pages
giving current-best proposed identifications, filenames and categorisations,
There's also a proposed general project strategy page:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:British_Library/Mechanical_Curat…
I'd really appreciate any thoughts or feedback that people have on
these -- I feel that I've been slightly finding my way in the dark, so
it would be good to know if people feel this is on the right track,
and/or if there are any ideas or suggestions that come to mind. There
are also some specific areas where any help would be really
appreciated:
* Map titles. Currently there are titles entered on the BL
Georeferencer for only about half of the georeferenced maps. (It was
an optional stage, easy to miss out). It would be incredibly helpful
if we could start filling in the ones that are missing. These are
currently shown as pink highlighted links on the batch pages. Note
that it's also necessary to make a minor edit on the map to get the
Georeferencer to pass the update to its central spreadsheet -- in some
cases there /is/ a title, but it never got reflected to the central
list for this reason, because there's not been any subsequent edit to
the map. I'll try to update the batch pages at least once a day, to
track progress.
[[Added on Facebook: One thing I should add, when adding names to maps,
is that I find it helpful to work in groups of about 5 links at a time.
So: open 5 in georeferencer, then click the map tab for each of the 5,
then open Flickr pages, then add title & make null edit. Each of these
processes takes a while for the page to load, but working on a group of
5 at a time, you can keep going with the next step for the next one
without having to wait.]]
* More georeferencing. At the moment maps from UK-related books are
about 80% georeferenced. But the average for most places is only about
50%. So if there's a part of the world you would like to see
fast-tracked into the next lot of batches, finishing the
georeferencing for more of the maps from there would be really
helpful. For links and latest progress, see:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:British_Library/Mechanical_Curat…
* Hierarchies and category schemes. The batching and categorisation is
based on the hierarchical region-by-region analyses in this category:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:MC_map_identification-in-progre…
But these are based on modern countries and regions, returned by OSM's
Nominatim service. It would be really valuable to have input from
people who have a better knowledge of the countries and their
histories, to get a better idea of what subdivisions would make best
sense for categories and at what levels to stop subdividing), given
also that the maps are mostly 19th century, so there may also be
historic subdivisions which are quite different to current ones; what
towns and cities should be pulled out for their own categories of old
maps and plans; whether there are particular things it is worth trying
to identify and pull out by bounding box; etc.
* Map description pages on Commons. I am thinking the uploads to
Commons should use the "Map" description template. But I want to make
sure I will be using it properly. So I've gone through the template
field-by-field at
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template_talk:Map#Preparing_for_an_uploa…
with questions
to see if I'm on track. In particular, I've put some questions there
about e.g. the right way to use "map location" when the subject of the
map may be quite complex, such as showing a part of a river in a
particular county; "map date"; proper use of "title" vs "description";
"map type"; etc. -- and it would just be generally good if somebody
could sanity-check what I'm proposing to do, well before the start of
any uploading. I've also suggested adding quite a few further fields
to the template, for example "book-title", "volume", "page",
"publication-place", "book-author", "book-collaborator",
"scan-resolution", "zoom-level". Would all of these be acceptable?
Plus it would also be nice to make a much more prominent link to the
BL Georeferencer. Feedback on any or all of the above would be very
useful.
At the end of the day these are only scans from books, rather than more
luxury stand-alone maps. But there is still a lot here that I think
would be very useful to have on WikiCommons, so I am very interested
to know what people think.
-----
Again, if people could give any feedback or suggestions, I would be very
grateful.
All best regards,
James.
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Hello all,
For your information, the voting phase of the WMF Community Wishlist Survey
has begun and will close on December 10th, 2017.
There are more than 200 proposals in several main categories (i.e.:
Search); click on the categories to view the proposal's write-up and
discussions. More information on the community wishlist survey is in the
forwarded email below.
--
deb tankersley
Program Manager, Engineering
Wikimedia Foundation
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Johan Jönsson <jjonsson(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Mon, Nov 27, 2017 at 11:01 PM
Subject: [Wikimedia-l] You can now vote in the Community Wishlist Survey
Hey everyone,
The voting phase of the 2017 Community Wishlist Survey has now started.
Read the proposals and support the ones you want to support to make the
wikis better:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2017_Community_Wishlist_Survey
Click on the categories to find the proposals. The voting will close on
December 10.
That's the important part of this email. Feel free to follow the link above
and starting voting right now.
The longer version:
The Community Wishlist Survey decides what the Wikimedia Foundation
Community Tech team will work on over the next year. The team is responsible
for addressing the top 10 wishes on the list, as well as some wishes from
smaller groups and projects that are doing important work, but don't have
the numbers to get their proposal into the top 10. The Wishlist is also
used by volunteer developers and other teams, who want to find projects to
work on that the community really wants.
Come help set the agenda.
If you want to see what the team has done in 2017, see the status report
from last month:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016_Community_Wishlist_
Survey/Status_report_1
What you can do now:
*) Vote. This is the most important thing.
*) Spread the word. We really want people to find this, of course, and
we'll work on finding the best balance between spreading the news to
everyone and not being annoying, but please do help to spread the
information in your local community – Village Pump equivalents, IRC
channels, social media groups and so on.
*) Help translating the pages. We want the process to be as available as
possible for everyone. It's not every available if it's only in English.
*) If you want to get short updates through the notification system, you
can sign up for the Community Tech Newsletter:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Newsletter:The_Community_Tech_Newsletter
//Johan Jönsson
--
We’d like to notify our community about a few project updates and personnel
moves that will affect the Discovery team.
Earlier this year, the Discovery Department was split up into two main
teams - Search Platform that is under Technology and the Discovery team
that is under the Audiences:Readers umbrella. Now that the search frontend
UI/UX work has wrapped up and the Wikipedia.org portal has been modernized,
we are consolidating as a team focusing on the Search backend. Our frontend
responsibilities are moving onto other teams with the Readers team. Here’s
a breakdown by project:
-
We are putting the final touches on the automation of statistics and
translations updates for the Wikipedia.org portal page. This will enable
the stats and translations to be automatically updated on a weekly basis
with minimal involvement by humans. [1][2]
-
The Maps initiative will be moving to be a part of the Readers
Infrastructure team and we’re currently investigating a new open-sourced
backend map tile server replacement. [3]
-
We will be communicating soon about any impact this will have on
Discovery projects. [4]
-
The Search Platform team will continue enhancing and refining the
machine learning-to-rank backend functionality while expanding our language
support. [5]
Our frontend team members will be integrated into the rest of the
organization over the next few weeks:
-
Deb Tankersley will take on the Program Manager (Engineering) role in
Technology
-
Jan Drewniak will move to Readers Mobile Web
-
Paul Norman will move to Readers Infrastructure
-
Mikhail Popov and Chelsy Xie will remain in Readers and begin working on
new projects while assisting in a part-time basis with search analysis
Cheers,
The Discovery Team
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T140159
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia.org_Portal
[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps
[4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery
[5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/Search
--
deb tankersley
Product Manager, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation
Hello,
The slide deck from today's quarterly metrics presentation of the Wikimedia
Foundation's Readers team (which is an appendix to the main quarterly
check-in presentation) has been published. [1] [2]
This deck gives an overview of the core metrics regarding readership of
Wikimedia sites and including data about search, maps, and the Wikipedia
portal from the Discovery team.
[1]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AWikimedia_Foundation_Readers_metr…
[2]
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AAudiences_2_check-in_Q1_October_2…
--
deb tankersley
Product Manager, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation
