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