I 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?
As there was no response, I resurrected the code from my ar-
chives and created
<URI:http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Mapsources>
(code available by "git clone
http://www.tim-landscheidt.de/git/Mapsources")uot;). It's not yet
ready for production, but with the main source file below
300 LOCs, it shouldn't be that hard (mainly properly vali-
dating and escaping input).
Tim