[Wikipedia-l] Re: Mapping complement to Wikipedia?

[Jeff Meyer]

Hi Mark -
You've sort of hit the nail on the head of what I'm envisioning.

While the tool I'm thinking about might need to be a fat client or a heavy
Java plug-in, I agree that it would need to be able to provide output to
tech-challenged browsers.

Side note: the interesting thing about picking a fixed interval for
animations is that a lot of weird stuff can take place in that gap, but
that's a problem for a little further down the road.

If you're looking for a cool application that comes close to what I have in
mind, check out: www.timemap.net.

As for Wikipedia integration, I think there are some challenges to working
with map-based data that would make just contributing maps to Wikipedia a
partial solution. That said, hopefully we can get a more sophisticated
solution to generate maps and linked objects for the Wikipedia and then
crank out what we need as content is contributed.
- Jeff


"Delirium" <delirium at rufus.d2g.com> wrote in
message news:403EA598.8060706 at rufus.d2g.com...
> If you have a way to do this, or get it started, by all means start
> adding high-quality maps to Wikipedia!  If it's specialized content that
> doesn't fit in Wikipedia, you can start a Wikibook as well.
>
> I for one would love to see maps of the Roman Empire's extent every 50
> years through its history, to name just one example, and possibly these
> could be put into an animation of some sort as well (though to keep
> things flexible for technologically-impaired browsers and possible
> printed versions, we should probably have map snapshots illustrating the
> article as well as a link to the animated map).
>
> Is that the sort of thing you had in mind?  If so, it's something I've
> been looking for for a while, but I have no idea how one would go about
> creating that sort of thing.
>
> -Mark