Wikimedia Maps/2015-2017

Group:	Maps team @ Discovery
Start:	2015-04
End:	2017-12
Team members:	Guillaume Lederrey (part time ops), Paul Norman (contractor)
Backlog:	#maps
Updates:	Status updates

The maps project aims to build cartography technologies for all Wikimedia projects, at a scale sufficient for their widespread usage. Please leave your feedback and ideas to help guide future development. For assistance using the map feature, see the help page on the Kartographer extension.

Welcome to the Discovery Maps Team

Please help us plan by adding any use-cases you think would benefit the Wiki communities

Cartographical efforts consist of several sub-projects:

At its core, the maps project uses Kartotherian map tile service. Kartotherian makes OpenStreetMap data available as image tiles, the map on which other tools can draw useful information. See #Production maps cluster.
Geoshapes service, part of Kartotherian, makes OpenStreetMap shapes data, such as countries, cities outlines, or even building outlines available directly to the clients via Wikidata IDs.
Kartographer extension allows editors to insert an interactive map and add article specific data into wiki pages. See the section on the Kartographer extension.
GeoData extension allows articles to specify geographical coordinates, and expose them via search API.

Kartographer extension

The Kartographer extension allows editors to insert a map and add article specific data into wiki pages, such as shapes and points of interest.

Kartographer also has a Visual Editor interface to make it easy to add maps. Kartographer extension have been enabled in Wikivoyage and a few Wikipedia languages.

Other maps users

The Wikipedia Android app shows all nearby articles on a map using the Maps service.
The Wikidata query service uses maps to visualize query results.
Geohack, used by Wikipedia to provide links to various mapping services, uses the map tile service for the Russian and Italian Wikipedias. English, and other wiki's are planned for the future.

Milestones and Updates

Yurik presenting at the State of the Map US 2016 about Wikimedia Maps efforts.

https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2016-February/081637.html

Wikimedia projects that have Maps enabled

All projects (in all languages) have maplink enabled.
All projects (in all languages) have mapframe enabled (except Wikipedia).

Select Wikipedia sites that have mapframe enabled:
- Catalan
- Hebrew
- Russian
- Macedonian
- French
- Finnish
- Norwegian
- Swedish
- Portuguese
- Basque
- Czech
- Spanish
- Latvian
- Arabic
- Kannada

Production maps cluster

The production maps cluster (See also on Wikitech) is in development by the WMF Discovery team. The implementation has various components including:

Kartotherian Github (primary) / Diffusion (mirror) - a server capable of providing map tiles in vector (pbf) or raster (png) formats, as well as static map snapshots of any size for a given location.
Tilerator Github (primary) / Diffusion (mirror) – a distributed backend tile generation service with a job queue.
A flexible sources system to set up the needed storage and processing pipeline

A version of the tile server is now in operation at maps.wikimedia.org.

It serves tiles at URLs such as https://maps.wikimedia.org/osm-intl/11/327/791.png (bitmap) or …/791.json (OSM data – waterways, roads, place labels, etc.).
It can scale images for the high-DPI devices – e.g. 1.5x, 2x, etc …/791@1.3x.png
It can provide static maps with a given size and scaling, e.g. https://maps.wikimedia.org/img/osm-intl,6,44.8247,4.9981,1000x600.png
For now, maps.wikimedia.org only accepts requests from the domains in wmflabs.org, *.wikivoyage.org, or incubator.wikimedia.org.
https://maps.wikimedia.org/ is a simple map server that serves the Leaflet JavaScript library and some static files to provide a pannable, zoomable map using the Production maps cluster.
Please adapt your own labs tools to use maps.wikimedia.org! Set your tool's domain to *.wmflabs.org.

How to guides and more information