Commons:Wikimaps/Project

The Future

What do you think Wikimaps could focus on?

The Wikimaps Nordic report has been published. It tells about what has been done. There are many ideas that have either been tested or thought of. If you have interest in working with historical places and weaving Wikimedia knowledge into it, let us know what you are interested in!

• Better way to search/browse maps on Commons: One thing which bothers me for awhile is that even though we already have lot of maps on Commons, there is no convenient to search or browse for maps. I repeatedly noticed, that Wiki users search for maps outside of Commons although the same map already exist on Commons. I guess the category system doesn't work well to find maps for a specific time and place. Also the categories often are messed. Maybe we could build a map catalog in WikiData with information about place, extent, scale, time. Maybe such data could be derived from the map template. Then it would be cool to have some web interface to search through that catalog. --Alexrk2 (talk) 22:18, 30 December 2015 (UTC)

  Thanks for the input! Finding maps has been on the agenda from the beginning, but we decided to postpone developing it until we can get more Wikimedia aspects covered. First, we would need community consensus to be able to add maps to Wikidata. Second, we might need a geospatial database to store the geographic data in Wikidata, but I think that can be optional. Third, for (historical) map properties I have started preliminary work in Wikidata. It is still a mess, mainly because I copied complex publication properties over from WikiProject Books. Please help sorting it out into a more simple model! Cheers, Susannaanas (talk) 23:14, 30 December 2015 (UTC)