Topic on Help talk:Extension:Kartographer

As of today, interactive (Kartographer) maps no longer display in the language of the territory mapped; instead, you’ll read them in the content language of the wiki where they appear—or in the language their authors specify (subject to availability of multilingual data). In addition, mapframe, the feature that automatically embeds dynamic maps right on a wiki page, is now live on most Wikipedias that lacked the feature. (Not included in the mapframe launch are nine Wikipedias that use the stricter version of Flagged Revisions).

If you you’re new to mapframe, this Kartographer help page shows how to get started putting dynamic maps on your pages.  If you’d like to read more about map internationalization: this Special Update explains the feature and its limitations; this post and this one describe the uses of the new parameter, lang=”xx”, which  lets you specify a map’s language. And here are some example maps, to illustrate the new capabilities.

These features could not have been created without the generous programming contributions and advice of map-loving volunteers, including Yurik, framawiki, Naveenpf, TheDJ, Milu92, Atsirlin, Evad37, Pigsonthewing, Mike Peel, eranroz, Gareth and Abbe98. My apologies to anyone I’ve missed.

The Collaboration team's Map Improvements 2018 project wraps up at the end of June, so please give internationalized maps and mapframe a try soon and give us your feedback on the project talk page. We’re listening.

@JMatazzoni (WMF), cool! Is there a way to define the lang= parameter globally for all maps shown on one page, instead of writing it every time in every maplink call? --Atsirlin (talk) 09:04, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

There isn't, because the lang parameter defaults to the page language. Could you tell me what your use case is, though? It sounds like maybe page language should be (or is) different in that situation.

@atsirlin Thanks for the comment. The quick answer is "No, but" ;) There's no real easy way of doing this right now, but there might be mitigating circumstances we can work around depending on your use case.

Can you explain more about your need? What is this for? Is this for a page that has translations, or general article? If you give us more details, we might be able to see how to help better.

Thanks!

[edit] What Roan said ;)

@Roan Kattouw (WMF), @Mooeypoo, at Wikivoyage we have one mapframe in the beginning of the article followed by multiple maplinks for individual objects (places of interest). Take this page as an example. The map icon at the beginning of the page is a mapframe set to lang=en, so it shows English street names, which is good. Then the red boxes 1-5 are individual objects defined by the maplink. If I click on them, I still see the map in Chinese, because the lang parameter has not been defined (and no Russian labels are available). My question is: how can I define lang= for all these maplinks (on a given page) globally? I don't really want to write lange=en every time, because a typical Wikivoyage article has between 30 and 100+ such maplinks.

PS. Another solution I can think of is changing language fallback scheme for a given wiki. In other words, define that Russian Wikivoyage will always choose the languages in the following sequence: language given by the lang= parameter --> Russian (language of the wiki) --> English --> local. This should solve most if not all issues we have. --Atsirlin (talk) 19:42, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

Right now we don't have a way to define fallbacks on a per-wiki basis, only on a per-language basis. So we can set the fallback for Russian to English, but there are two problems with that. One is that this would affect all other Russian-language wikis, not just Russian Wikivoyage.

The other is that some place name labels in OpenStreetMap have a "local" name but no Russian name, even if the local name is in Russian. In that situation our software thinks there is no Russian name, and it might display an English name for a place in Russia. There's a proposal to fix that in the OSM data, but that will be a slow process and the OSM community hasn't yet agreed on how to handle it, so for now we've been telling people to fix these cases one by one as they spot them. Because of this issue, we are being careful with fallbacks in the meantime, because we don't want to show English names for places in Russia to Russian-speaking users.

So we can add a fallback to English if there is community consensus for it, but we want people to be aware of the issue with English names, and to be ready to fix those in OSM. Then there's the issue that this affects all wikis that speak the same language, which we haven't given much thought to yet. @CKoerner (WMF), what are your thoughts on that?

@Roan Kattouw (WMF), thanks for your response! Yes, I understand the problem. What about the first part of my question? Equally difficult?