Category talk:Locator maps of seas

SVG Maps

I have created a set of SVG maps of most of the seas and would like to contribute them to Wikimedia (under the standard license (CC BY-SA 3.0)). However, I'm not sure how best to proceed.

I created the maps for the purposes of the Anki Ultimate Geography deck, so I chose the style of the maps to fit in with that of the maps already used there. The vast majority of the maps previously present there were taken (obviously in compliance with their license) from the German Locator map project, and in particular the SVG 16:9 locator maps of countries, (for example Belarus in its region) hence I followed their stylistic and mapping choices:

• Using the Winkel Tripel projection.
• Including country borders (despite the focus of the maps being on the seas!).
• Including a mini-map.
• Using the same colours for coastlines, country borders, seas, land territories and the mini-map.

The main independent choice was choosing a colour for the highlighted seas. AFAICT there are no specific guidelines in the Locator maps design recommendations regarding the marker colour for water bodies. The generally recommended dark red marker colour looked extremely weird for seas, so I chose a dark blue (#4790c8).

(As background: "Anki Ultimate Geography" is a flashcard deck for the open-source, spaced-repetion system, Anki. Its purpose is to help people learn the locations, capitals and flags (where appropriate) of various geographical areas — countries, regions and seas.)

The maps are generated from Natural Earth Data's shapefiles, mostly using mapshaper, via a horribly messy web of scripts (available here). In general, where possible, I aimed to follow the IHO's 1953 "Limits of Oceans and Seas" to determine the extent of the seas (the data in the shapefiles was mostly, with a couple of exceptions, consistent with these definitions).

The generated maps are available here (a couple of them in the "original" SVG, the remainder converted to PNG — git wasn't too happy with a larger number of the relatively heavy SVG files). (I obviously have all the SVGs on my computer.)

The World Map including "marked up" sea and ocean areas, equivalent to World location map (W3).svg is here.

My main questions are:

1. What naming scheme should I follow for the maps?

2. How should I categorise them? (e.g. should I add them to this category?)

3. The SVGs are pretty large (~ 5 MB). Should I try to reduce this (e.g. removing the extent of countries, which is nice-to-have in case somebody wishes to edit one to highlight both a given country and a given water body, but not exactly essential for the maps-as-they-currently-are)?

4. As described above, the stylistic choices were based on the SVG locator maps for countries, rather than on the existing PNG locator maps of seas. I think having such a set of maps which highlight seas in the political context (country borders) is valuable. However, it might be worth also creating a set of SVG maps that are very close to the existing PNG ones, so that they could be drop-in replacements. (That would involve copying the colour scheme (possibly with changes?) and the choice of "cropping" (what areas other than the seas themselves, are visible. Some of the PNG maps have slightly fuzzy choices regarding the extent of the seas, in some cases (e.g. Celtic Sea), so IMO it would probably be best not to copy that. As the current PNG images are extremely light, it might also be worth more aggressively optimising the size of the SVGs.) If some other style (colours/choice of projection) would be desirable I could also probably do that, relatively easily.

Aplaice (talk) 22:38, 4 January 2020 (UTC)