Magnus Manske magnusmanske@googlemail.com wrote:
perhaps this would be a good moment to transfer Geohack to a regular mediawiki-extension on the main servers.
I hear this was also the plan of brion vibber before he go. Who we need to ask now for this?
I asked Brion on the Paris meeting and he said he'd have a look. But, I didn't hear anything back, so I assume he didn't.
wikimedia.org doesn't list an official CTO, so for the time being, I guess Tim Starling is the person to ask.
Last time I had a long look at the code, the extension part seemed to be in good condition. One half is using it as a special page (just a wrapper around the current code calls), and getting the wiki template from the cache instead of the http rendering.
Compatability might have deteriorated since then, though. [...]
I had a look at the code one or two years ago, and started a small DWIM-and-nothing-more extension "Mapsources" along the lines of "Booksources" that "called" a template with the co- ordinates as parameters so that you could use all of Media- Wiki's parser functions & Co. in it. The idea would have been to extend it eventually to have the list of map sources ordered by the region of the individual coordinate and by user preference (Swiss coordinates: Swisstopo, British coor- dinates: Ordnance Survey, etc.) with a timeout so that if you don't react within x seconds the first map source is chosen.
But #1, then I stumbled upon a post of yours where you pointed out that Special:TemplateLink would be much more suitable to replace the whole Geohack shebang, and I think you were right.
But #2, with all the work going on with OSM and the Maps extension, wouldn't it be wiser to integrate Geohack's func- tionality with the later?
Tim (f'uping to wikitech-l)