Wikimedia Maps/Status of map styles

August 14, 2018
The Wikimedia Foundation wrapped up development on Wikimedia Maps in 2017 due to other priorities taking precedence and as we made plans for the 2018-19 annual plan. Particularly our efforts around mobile editing and retaining new contributors. At the time we were working on finding partner organizations to help with support with maps without success.

Around the same time, contributors who wanted Maps features proposed a set of improvements on the 2017 Community Wishlist Survey, and the community voted it up to to be the most supported proposal on the wishlist.

It was a big project to make the Maps features stable and functional on all wikis, so the Collaboration team took it on as a time-limited project. They worked mid-January to June on internationalization, back-end stability and other improvements, making the mapframe maps available on across Wikimedia projects. You can read more about the accomplishments of the team on the project page or on the Wikimedia blog.

That project has ended and there is no more product feature work planned. The Collaboration team is busy working on the annual plan goals we set out to do for the fiscal year 2018-2019.

There will be ongoing maintenance work for the Maps features, to make sure that the service stays available and functional.

There was also maps work underway by staff that has been going on for some time now: an update to map styles that included indications of disputed borders and better cartographic fidelity. (T153282, T113008) To release these new styles, we’d need a product team actively working on the project. The product teams have moved on to other projects, so this can't be completed and released right now.

The good news is that there's another Community Wishlist Survey coming up in November 2018. The maps proposal trounced all the other proposals last year, and we expect that a new proposal for map styles and disputed borders would do well this year. If the maps proposal gets into the top 10 on the Wishlist Survey, the Community Tech team will deploy the new maps features in early 2019. Feel free to get people excited about voting for it this Fall; canvassing is encouraged on the Wishlist Survey. You can also watchlist the Wikimedia Maps page to keep updated on future map developments.