Hi all,
first of all I regret very much that I won't be able to make it to the
Zurich Hackathon, but Idaho, USA is a bit too far and I have just
switched to a new job.
Anyhow, I'd just like to chime in and support what Derk-Jan said
above. Even though the WikiMiniAtlas, a dynamic map, is my project I
think it is very important to recognize the way maps are used in
Wikipedia by our contributors. While this crowd is probably rather
interested in the technical side of dynamic maps, mapping in Wikipedia
is very much an 'editorial' process. Dynamic maps are nice to provide
a quick geographical context and show nearby points of interest, but I
seriously doubt they will replace the types of maps we have in
articles today (with a few exceptions maybe). We have political maps
on many administrative levels, we have maps of biomes and species
distributions, geographical and geological maps (e.g. watershed maps),
climate maps, historical maps of battles and population migrations,
animated maps showing the evolution of empires, extraterrestrial maps,
and so on and so forth.
Don't get me wrong OSM data is awesome, and very rich, and it is a
fascinating and fun work to integrate as much of it into Wikipedia as
possible. But we have to keep in mind that OSM offers only a limited
scope in the vast array of map applications. And while simplification
and automation sounds appealing to us, what the mapping community will
see is most likely a loss of editorial power compared to custom maps.
Best,
Daniel
On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 5:36 PM, Derk-Jan Hartman
<d.j.hartman+wmf_ml(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 8 mrt. 2014, at 00:47, Russell Nelson <russnelson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Maps great, yes. Here's what *I* think
Wikipedia needs. First and foremost, OSM is a database, just like Wikipedia articles are
data (don't get me started). It's a foreign database, which means that you have
the foreign key problem. Wikipedia articles all have a published unique name. Perfect for
a foreign key. Articles can get moved, but in the ordinary course of editing, they
don't. In OSM, the key "wikipedia" is used to make reference to a Wikipedia
article. It can be the full URL, or simply the article name (latter is recommended).
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:wikipedia for details.
I agree, somewhat, but I think this is not 'Wikipedia' per se. It's as much a
need for OSM, as it is a need for Wikipedia. And articles do get moved (as much as OSM
nodes with tags on them get deleted).
Linking to OpenStreetMap entities, on the other
hand, is somewhat more abstract. OSM entities (nodes, ways, and relations, all fruitful
for Wikipedia linking) have a database ID. The trouble that the ID is only as persistent
as the database entry, which can change through as simple a change as adding a bridge to a
road (one database entry becomes three -- the original, a new short one which is the
bridge, and the remainder of the road, as a new way). Probably the most persistent way to
link to an entity is to give a lat/lon of a node, and give the name of the node. That is
enough information to recover from any editing (if the node gets moved or deleted, there
be congruent nodes nearby, and if the name is changed, you still have the node's
location). Particularly if the entity has a Wikipedia article name; a bot can audit both
databases against each other.
Wikipedia currently has only points in articles.
At most you can say "The subject of this article is at this point." which is
insufficient if the point is an area (in OSM, a self-terminating way), a way (e.g. road,
railroad, river), or a relation (a collection of related ways, e.g. a lake and its
islands, or a bus route). The Wikiuniverse could reinvent OSM's system for identifying
places, or it could bite the bullet, lean more heavily on OSM's data, and make article
references into explicit OSM references. Note that these references would not be OSM
specific -- any map is going to have lat/lon and names of entities. It's just that the
Wikipedia editor that helps make these links would use OSM lat/lons and names.
Well first of all, we should get away from the concept of 'article'. It's
really clear now that most of this data will soon live in WikiData. Coordinate values have
already been added, and it's only time until most of those existing values have been
moved into WikiData and there is the OSM relation ID property to link from WikiData to
OSM. For entities/concepts WikiData is the only thing that will be relevant real soon. And
a bot can easily detect when those break. So what you want in this regard is already in
process.
Then, once Wikipedia articles can make reference
to OSM objects, and you have a OSM-derived Wikimedia-hosted set of map tiles, then
including a dynamic map in an article is simply a matter of a single command. And an
article which is a collection of articles can make a map with references to those
articles, again, with a single command.
This is thinking way too simple. Would it be nice to be able to do this ? Sure, but we
already have dynamic maps. WikiMiniAtlas, the german OSM map. Those even have area
highlights these days. Can they be better ? sure, is that something difficult, is it
really needed ? No not really x2. Wikipedians are much more focused on making static maps
usually. Or rather, they often want very specific types of maps, resulting in them using
custom designed static maps. These custom maps have different base layer types for
different types of articles (and sometimes for different cultures cross wiki), and very
simple highlights in them (less is more). Or they want to mark the spot of an event
(planecrash/hurricane path etc). If we do not recognize the target group, then the
integration of the feature will fail.
Also, there are many problems with dynamic maps in articles (print, mobile, loadtime,
fallback for users without JS). Can we do many cool things with maps ? sure. but where is
the most valuable place to start ? That is a much better question I think.
Personally, I think the power is in annotation. The success of FA, Commons, WikiData and
OSM have shown that our users love to not just 'collect' data, but to do the
curation, annotation and restoration of this data.
Doing annotation using a simple OSM renderer as our starting point could be step 1. We
need support for 'static' image maps to generate the buy in of people to start
using this feature (step 2). With enough buy in, we can start going for the long haul,
which is to build a very complex map renderer with a lot of different baselayer
configurations, that might help us at some time achieve to phase out the static maps. But
saying we need 'dynamic maps' is way too narrow and technical view.
The other thing we could build, would be the 'foursquare' microcontributions to
our mapping data (can you pinpoint this location on this OSM map, there are five locations
in this area, which one best represents this article) and then with enough confirmed
information set/add/correct/suggest the OSM value in wikidata again. Things like that
(gamification). I think that is where we have a lot of potential.
DJ
And .... here's the money shot: your location
gets shown on the map.
BTW, Special:Nearby is broken. Android phone, Chrome Browser, GPS on and locked (Ingress
is happy), "Quiet out here ... there weren't any pages found nearby." Yet I
could throw a stone and hit the location of a page AND my Google Glass app is happy to
report that a page is very close to me.
On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 4:55 PM, Arthur Richards <arichards(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Somehow wikitech-l got dropped form the recipient list of this thread; I know some of the
OSM folks are subscribed. Anyway, re-added wikitech-l to this thread.
On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 1:53 PM, Jon Robson <jdlrobson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Sounds like a good idea. If there is no objections to my potentially crazy idea I will
drop them a note on their mailing list...
On 7 Mar 2014 13:27, "Arthur Richards" <arichards(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Dunno if any of the OSM-y folks are planning to attend but I bet this would be up their
alley. At the very least, it would probably be good to get their input on a project like
this.
On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 11:44 AM, Jon Robson <jdlrobson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Dan awesome! Glad there is some interest - this should be a lot of fun! :-)
On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 1:20 PM, Quim Gil <qgil(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
fyi
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [WikimediaMobile] Zurich Hackathon: Creating a map namespace
Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2014 12:54:52 -0800
From: Jon Robson <jdlrobson(a)gmail.com>
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>rg>, mobile-l
<mobile-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
This may be extremely ambitious, but I'm keen to kick off development
around the creation of a map namespace during the Zurich hackathon.
The goal would be to setup an editable map namespace that could be
used for a variety of things, one of which would be adding a map view
to the Special:Nearby page provided via the mobile site. The goal is a
proof of concept not necessarily anything production ready (but that
would be great if we could get to that point!)
Please let me know if you would also be interested on hacking such a
thing -
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Z%C3%BCrich_Hackathon_2014/Geo_Namespace
- or if doing so would be a terrible idea (but if you have to go down
that route please provide constructive reasoning on what would be a
less terrible idea)
Excited to hack on cool things in Zurich!
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Software Engineer, Mobile
[[User:Awjrichards]]
IRC: awjr
+1-415-839-6885 x6687
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