Wikimedia Maps/2015-2017

OpenStreetMap and the Wikimedia Discovery Department have collaborated to launch a new trial map tile rendering service available at https://maps.wikimedia.org. With this service we hope to encourage our community to create tools and integrations to develop new ways for readers and editors to discover Wikimedia content. We strongly believe that our knowledge engine needs to be powered by multiple entry points and think that maps are a key discovery tool.

Current status
Live @ https://maps.wikimedia.org

The service is currently in a experimental mode meaning that at times it may be rapidly changing and unstable. Currently, we can only handle traffic from *.wmflabs.org and *.wikivoyage.org (referrer header must be either missing or set to these values) but we hope to open it up to Wikipedia traffic if we see enough use.

Through late 2015 the Discovery department will be looking for your feedback and usage to determine further development. We are also exploring an extension to wiki syntax to support maps.

Getting started
maps.wikimedia.org serves standard Web Mercator raster tiles so it should be a drop-in replacement for other tileservers serving [Https://www.openstreetmap.org/ OpenStreetMap-based] imagery. To point a tool to our mapserver, use the following URL schema: Adding a maps within Leaflet is as easy as
 *  https://maps.wikimedia.org/{style}/{z}/{x}/{y}.{format} 
 *  https://maps.wikimedia.org/{style}/{z}/{x}/{y}@{scale}x. {format} - with the optional scaling factor

An example of a map that uses our tiles is at maps.beta.wmflabs.org, source.

Static map images
Maps are also capable of serving static images, such as https://maps.wikimedia.org/img/osm-intl,7,43.66,4.719,800x600.png

URL:  https:/ /maps.wikimedia.org/img/{style},{z},{lat},{lon},{width}x{height}@{scale}x.png

Future plans

 * See here

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) / Gerrit (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) / Gerrit (mirror) – a distributed backend tile generation service with a jobque
 * 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 can only accepts requests from the domains in wmflabs.org, *.wikivoyage.org, or incubator.wikimedia.org.
 * http://maps.beta.wmflabs.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.

Additional

 * Maps KPI's
 * OpenStreetMap page in Meta (historical from 2009 to 2011)
 * Collaboration with Wikipedia page in OSM wiki
 * Code statistics on OpenHub