On [[en:Talk:James Cook]] someone asked for a map of his travels. I could make such, but I would like to have a map to start from. Are there somewhere maps available that can be used for cases like this? Would it be an idea to have a map collection somewhere on Wikipedia to work from?
Andre Engels
engelsAG@t-online.de (Andre Engels) writes:
Are there somewhere maps available that can be used for cases like this?
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/docs/refmaps.html
Andre Engels wrote:
On [[en:Talk:James Cook]] someone asked for a map of his travels. I could make such, but I would like to have a map to start from. Are there somewhere maps available that can be used for cases like this? Would it be an idea to have a map collection somewhere on Wikipedia to work from?
If you check [[User:Morwen]]'s contribution history on the en: wiki, he's been contributing literally thousands of maps of counties and provinces and whatnot. I believe he mostly traces the outlines from maps in books, which isn't a copyright violation since it's just reproducing the factual information (a standard map projection of geographical data). Then he does shading and so on in an image-editing program.
Ideally we would simply import a lot of GIS data and auto-generate maps based on it ("i want a mercatur projection from this latitude/longitude to this latitude/longitude, with cities over 1m people labeled), but auto-generated maps, at least with freely-available software, unfortunately look pretty terrible. There's a few scattered around on Wikipedia, though I can't seem to find one at the moment, and they all look like the sort of thing you might have expected a computer-generated map to look like circa 1982.
-Mark
On Friday 20 February 2004 05:54, Delirium wrote:
Ideally we would simply import a lot of GIS data and auto-generate maps based on it ("i want a mercatur projection from this latitude/longitude to this latitude/longitude, with cities over 1m people labeled), but auto-generated maps, at least with freely-available software, unfortunately look pretty terrible. There's a few scattered around on Wikipedia, though I can't seem to find one at the moment, and they all look like the sort of thing you might have expected a computer-generated map to look like circa 1982.
There's a Mapmaking Expedition on Wikitravel. So far there are two programs (one's locked in my laptop hard drive until I get the laptop back, the other's by Yosemite) and a few maps. Both programs take lat/long data and produce an SVG file, which we then convert to PNG with Sodipodi.
phma
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