Heinz-Josef Lücking wrote:
Have also a look on http://www.giswiki.de/index.php/QuickWMS-Extension. It's an extension for mediawiki that integrates web map services
That sounds good, but who runs the WMS server and who owns the data? Can the sources handle (1) Wikimedia's strict freedom requirement and (2) the Slashdot effect on their servers?
There are many such ideas in the [[category:Wikimaps]] on meta. But we have to make a difference between futuristic ideas and things that work here and now. For example, today I inserted maps in the Russian Wikipedia's article on lake Onega and in the Danish Wikipedia's article on island Lolland. These languages have 30,000 articles each, and still they don't have maps for some of the most central parts of their own countries. I look forward to your SVG/JAVAX/WMS real time updated maps in 2007, with names in the right language fetched from Ultimate Wiktionary. But right now this project needs some simple free maps to fill in the most embarrasing blanks. Within one year, Danish and Russian should have 100,000 articles (assuming an annual growth factor of 3). Many of these will be written by volunteers who get inspiration from the beautiful maps.
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%B6%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B... http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolland
These maps are green-and-blue without names. This is when you download the PNG image from Commons and start GIMP to add names and features in your favorite language.