Dear Erica and everyone,

I must concur with Stephan Knauss's statement about OpenStreetMap:
At least it is related in the way that this community provides the data 
enabling you to render maps.

Although there are no terms that would force anyone to provide its tiles back to OpenStreetMap, I find it quite unpleasant that the FOSS communities don't back each other in their goals.

Anyway, we have already removed Wikimedia Maps from our local portal at openstreetmap.cz . Yet the announcement made us quite sad, as the Wikimedia Maps tiles were one of the few OSM-based tile services updated regularly and often.

Regards
 Jan



On Thu, 3 Sep 2020 at 10:49, Erica Litrenta <elitrenta@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Hi everyone,

here are a few clarifications about our prior announcement about the Maps API deprecation for 3rd parties [1].

As stated, our plan is *not* going to have any impact on any Wikimedia-hosted wikis. This means that nothing will change for maps, in any namespace, on Wikipedia and any sister projects. Tools that are hosted on Wikimedia services are also not going to be affected (i.e., Kartographer).

This said, we are aware that there may be map usage that doesn’t fit into such venues where deprecation would still affect our community members and their activities - for instance, the Wiki Loves Monuments website, and the Wikimedia Poland chapter website both rely on our maps API. 


Hence, over the 45 day deprecation period which ends in mid October: *if you represent an affiliated free knowledge group that does regular work with our maps (any Wikimedia affiliates, or established wikiprojects), or if you are closely partnering with other entities who do, we welcome you to reach out, either here on this announcement thread or on the dedicated Phabricator ticket [2].*


We will work with you to understand your needs, and what alternatives exist. For further questions, I encourage you to contact me off-list to reduce noise. 

Thank you.

 

[1] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/maps-l/2020-August/001729.html 

[2] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T261694  



--
Erica Litrenta
Manager, Community Relations Specialists
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