Re: [discovery] Permission to access maps.wikimedia.org tiles

Hello Pine, We are fortunate to have a developer on our maps team who is also a board member of and contributor to OSM, and what he has explained to me is that our two organizations have very different use cases for maps that each require different levels of infrastructure and development. In fact, you may have seen his great response earlier on this list about the differences between OSM and WMF map tile rendering needs.[0] So, to some extent, we are already in collaboration, but for OSM to adopt the weight of WMF's needs is really up to them. We are very glad to be able to utilize the data their community curates, and perhaps over time we will move even closer together on the collaboration spectrum. Thanks for the suggestion, it certainly makes sense to consider it! Best, Erika [0] https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/discovery/2017-February/001437.html On Mon, Feb 6, 2017 at 7:51 PM, Pine W &lt;wiki.pine(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote: > Hi Erika, > > > Pine > > > On Mon, Feb 6, 2017 at 1:16 PM, Erika Bjune &lt;ebjune(a)wikimedia.org&gt; wrote: > >> Hi Svetlana, >> >> While we do get data from OSM, we run our own tile server called >> Kartotherian <https://github.com/kartotherian/kartotherian>, mainly for >> the following reasons: >> >> - OSM's infrastructure is fragile and has cache challenges >> - Their datacenter is in London, which means latency becomes an issue >> - OSM's rendering stack can't scale horizontally well enough to be >> sure they could handle our load >> - Their map style is not mobile friendly >> - We require multilingual and vector tiles, which their stack can't >> do (currently) >> - We wanted to provide nicer map styling in general >> >> Hope that helps! >> >> On Mon, Feb 6, 2017 at 1:06 PM, Svetlana Tkachenko < >> svetlana(a)members.fsf.org&gt; wrote: >> >>> Are we even building our own tiles? I thought the 'Wikimedia maps' is >>> just an interface to OSM. >>> >>> _______________________________________________ >>> discovery mailing list >>> discovery(a)lists.wikimedia.org >>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery >>> >> >> >> >> -- >> ------------------------------------ >> Erika Bjune >> Engineering Manager - Discovery >> Wikimedia Foundation >> >> _______________________________________________ >> discovery mailing list >> discovery(a)lists.wikimedia.org >> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery >> >> > > _______________________________________________ > discovery mailing list > discovery(a)lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/discovery > > -- ------------------------------------ Erika Bjune Engineering Manager - Discovery Wikimedia Foundation