Map improvements 2018

During the first half of 2018, the WMF Collaboration team will make improvements to Kartographer and associated map functions. The team’s engagement with maps was prompted in part by the overwhelming support the maps community gave the 2017 Community Wishlist proposal Kartographer Improvements, though the work won’t be restricted to items named there. The project is currently in its very early research and planning stages. It has a limited term that’s scheduled to conclude at the end of June 2018.

Goals
The immediate goals of the Map Improvements project are: Goals that relate to extending maps to a wider audience—such as bringing mapframe functionality to English Wikipedia (as requested by RfC) and making sure that mapframe works properly on wikis that use Flagged Revisions (T151665)—are also under serious consideration.
 * To ensure that Kartographer and the associated maps technology stack are stable and can be easily maintained as maps gain a wider audience.
 * To accomplish the two “main wishes” named in the Community Wishlist proposal, along with as many of the other wishes as are possible in the time provided. The main wishes are T112948, “All map location names should be shown in the user's language” (an extremely challenging but crucial job), and T180907, “Add zoom level 19.”

Background and approach
Maps are a valuable form of visual data that can improve reader understanding of many topics in our encyclopedias and other free-knowledge projects. Yet currently, only 14 Wikipedias, of almost 300, have the mapframe function that puts an actual map—as opposed to just a link to a map—on article pages. Meanwhile, the Kartographer technology and user experience require basic improvements to bring them up to software-development and general wiki best practices—and to make the system easier to maintain. On the user experience front, for example, Kartographer currently displays maps only in the language of the territory mapped, rather than in the language of the wiki where the map exists, let alone in the preferred language of the map reader.

While advanced interactive and annotation features for maps can be useful, especially on WikiVoyage, it’s the judgement of our engineering and design teams that supporting such features—and making them technically stable and usable by a broad audience—would require significant investment in technical staffing extending over many years to come. The Map Improvements 2018 project will, therefore, not emphasize these types of features, prioritizing instead fixes to the system that make it easier to maintain, especially at scale, while improving the user experience for the broader and more basic use case one might call “locator” maps—maps which show the position of events or entities, along with basic geographic features. (Just to be clear, advanced features that exist now will continue; they just won't be the focus of our upgrades.)

The decision not to build out interactive and advanced annotation features at this time may disappoint some who voted for the Kartographer Improvements Wishlist proposal. To put that decision in perspective, however, it might be worth noting that the investment represented by the Map Improvements 2018 project, which will absorb the full energies of the Collaboration team over five-plus months, is already much larger than the scope usually allowed for Wishlist tasks.

Current Activity
As of this writing (March, 2018), the project is in its first stages. The Collaboration team has been meeting with members of the former Maps team and has assembled a list of tasks that align with the goals described above. We can’t promise that we’ll get to all of the tasks on this list, but we’ll give it our best effort. (For an up-to-date view of the tasks that are in progress, go to the Collaboration team Phabricator board “This Quarter” and sort for the tag “Collaboration-Feature-Rollouts (Collaboration-Maps).”.”)

We want to hear from anyone with an interest in maps. If you have thoughts about any of the tasks on our board, please leave them in the task discussions; or use the Maps Improvements 2018 talk page for comments and questions about the project in general.