Wikimedia Maps/2015-2017

OpenStreetMap and Wikimedia are collaborating at multiple levels, many times thanks to individual efforts of volunteers, sometimes through formal projects involving the Wikimedia Foundation or chapters.

Let's map this collaboration. Every entry should have a wiki page, a bug report or a URL somewhere.

Current status
Maps servers are live at https://maps.wikimedia.org

They are in a EXPERIMENTAL mode, which means we are actively working on them, changing some features, and sometimes break stuff. Also this means that they will NOT handle Wikipedia traffic yet. Moreover, it is restricted to be used only from *.wmflabs.org and *.wikivoyage.org (referer header must be either missing or set to these values)

Getting Started
maps.wikimedia.org serves standard Web Mercator raster tiles so it should be a drop-in replacement for other tileservers serving OpenStreetMap-based imagery. To point a tool to our mapserver, use the following URL schema:  https://maps.wikimedia.org/osm/{z}/{x}/{y}.png  or with the optional scaling factor -  https://maps.wikimedia.org/osm/{z}/{x}/{y}@{scale}x.png .

An example of a map that uses our tiles is at maps.beta.wmflabs.org, sources for it are here.

Use cases

 * An editor wants to easily add a map to a Wikipedia article without leaving the Wikipedia site.
 * A reader wants to zoom and pan a map in a Wikipedia article.
 * A reader wants to see a zoomable, pannable map immediately when they click geo-coordinates on an article.
 * An editor wants to add geographic information about the location where they currently are.
 * A reader wants to navigate articles with an atlas (instead of typing a page name or URL, zoom and pan a map, and click pins)
 * A reader wants to browse Wikimedia Commons images on a map.
 * A reader wants to visualize geospatial data (country and city outlines, river courses, habitats for animals etc.)
 * An article shows interactive historical maps for certain areas. The map can contain annotation layers, POIs, routes, data layers etc. to illustrate the article topic. An editor wants to create these maps. (Taking part: Susannaanas (talk))
 * A historical map file can be displayed overlaid on a slippy map in the file display (file page / media viewer). Wikimaps design doc. (Taking part: Susannaanas (talk))
 * A reader/Commons user/editor wants to find scanned maps by selecting the area on a slippy map. Wikimaps design doc. (Taking part: Susannaanas (talk))
 * A reader can explore complex shapes (highways, geographic borders etc.) inside the infoboxes much better by using a slippymap than a static image. (need support for: kml, geoJSON, topoJSON)
 * An editor wants to add and edit maps using VisualEditor. We already have some proof of concept code so we just need some API endpoints. ESanders (WMF)
 * User Mey2008's WikiVoyage dynamic maps, such as POI Map, Art Map, and Monument Map (RU).
 * Show Raster imagery of earth, e.g. from Natural Earth, and other planets/celestial bodies. Overlay them with useful info.
 * An editor want's to add coordinate information to a photo on Commons or wants to easily justify it.
 * An editor wants to specify a map on wikidata so it can be reused on any of the wikiarticles associated with that wikidata item. One wikidata item may have multiple associated maps - location map, current borders, historic borders (start date =?), etc. each with a specification stored on wikidata. These specifications specify what layers are to be used, from where (OSM or OHM or other) but probably don't include the map data.
 * An user of Wikivoyage want to have a strong combination of an article and a map as a travel guide.
 * An editor want to create a complex, individual map to show relations of objects that are mention in a article, see UMAP.
 * A user want to see the map in a language that he can read, see OSM:Multilingual_maps_Wikipedia_project.

Mobile app use cases

 * User is able to see the map of the nearby points of interests from the mobile app
 * User is able to explore points of interest next to the current article
 * User is able to view articles similar to the current one on the map (based on Wikidata class)
 * Mobile map is a complete replacement for the wikivoyage interface - layers for each type of element (eat, museum, sleep etc.) shown on the map with linking to element data on wikidata, localised by wikidata in your language. You will be able to access and edit wikivoyage info without ever going to the wikivoyage wikis.

Production maps cluster
The Production maps cluster is in development by the WMF Discovery team. The implementation has various components including:
 * Kartotherian Github /Gerrit - 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/Gerrit - 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/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_6_44.8247_4.9981_1000x600.png
 * For now, maps.wikimedia.org can only accepts requests from the domains in wmflabs.org or wikivoyage.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.

Other projects

 * Set up vector tiles rendering.
 * http://a.tiles.wmflabs.org/osm/slippymap.html
 * this is based on non-vector legacy tile creation, sometimes called mod_tile
 * T35980 – Wikimedia-hosted OpenStreetMap (OSM) / mapnik tileservers wanted for mobile usage.
 * Wikimaps & OpenHistoricalMap
 * WikiMiniAtlas deployed on major Wikipedias for years now, supporting over 50 languages
 * to see WikiMiniAtlas, click the drop-down arrow next to coordinates on any Wikipedia article (if JavaScript is enabled)
 * OpenStreetMap embedded in MediaWiki (see de:WP:GEO/Anwendungen/OpenStreetMap/en) – used in many Wikipedias (Q11426484)
 * WIWOSM, linkage between Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap – shows geometric objects from OSM for a Wikipedia article

Key Performance Indicators
We all know maps are important part of the knowledge eco-system, but to better serve the community, we should invest our efforts into addressing the maps use cases that are more used than others. In order to find such use cases, here are some key performance indicators we should track.
 * Discovery contributions
 * Amount of articles surfaced through a tile generated map that a user chose to read
 * Amount of articles that could have a map but don't
 * Overall map usage
 * Amount of individual sessions that fully loaded a tile generated map within a wiki page broken down for all tile services & tools
 * Amount of user interaction (zoom, drag, etc) for a tile generated map within a wiki page broken down for all tile services & tools

Wishlist

 * Proposed Bot to add Wikipedia/Wikidata tags to OSM features.
 * Local and regional bridges between both projects in order to collaborate in activities and events.
 * Wikimedia CH plans.
 * Log in to OSM with Wikimedia credentials.
 * Clarify licensing situation of OSM data used in Wikimedia. (T105090 -- seems to be ok)
 * Open-Wikidata-map.
 * A page to jot down use cases for historical maps and geodata (Susannaanas)