Creating city pages
From OpenStreetMap
Contents |
Introduction
We have a whole sprawling mass of wiki pages about places. Pages about countries are linked from the Mapping Projects. Depending on how things are organised (and whether they have been organised yet) you may see a list of regions, provinces or counties, each with their own wiki page. At the lowest level we have wiki pages dedicated to individual cities, towns or even villages.
The primary purpose of these wiki pages, is to coordinate mapping of the place. This might include a break down of the districts within the town, description of who is mapping and how far they have got. Sometimes percentage completion estimates are given. The way this information is organised is not set-down as a wiki policy. It is currently left to the preferences or whoever edits these pages (generally people living there, but also other wiki gardeners)
Unfortuntaly there is a tendency for these pages to fall in to disuse, and contain out-of-date map images and mapping progress information. In fact historically, before we had the feature of browsing a slippy map, some of these wiki pages were created just to give us a place to show a map image. As such, there is a lot stale infomation kicking around. To prevent a wiki pages becoming out-of-date, people should give consideration as to whether the information they are adding is likely to be maintained. How quickly will it go out of date? Am I intending to maintain the information myself? How likely is that somebody else will provide updates? With this in mind, you may decide not to create a place page at all, or you may decide to limit the mapping progress information you attempt to provide.
Place pages may also serve to attract people who might otherwise not have found the OSM project, and to gather up a little search engine kudos (especially if people link to these pages from other websites) Try to include information targetted at locals, to get people in your area interested in the project, but remember you can easily just link to pages such as Help, About, and Getting Involved, without trying to explain the project all over again!
Creating a wiki page
Navigate through the Mapping projects pages, to find a suitable place for your new city page, for example you could add an item to a list of cities.
Go to the "edit" tab, and add the name of your town, city, or area. The place name should go on a new line, with double square brackets around it.
Example:
*[[Portsmouth]]
Press "Save", and your link should show up as red, indicating that it's a page which hasn't been created yet. The * will add the bullet point.
Follow the red link. This will give you an editing interface to your new page. See Wiki Help for more information.
Using a template to create the page text
Copy the following text into your new page (using the "Edit this page" link), and fill-in each of the fields
{{place|name=|type=|area=|image=|lat=|long=|zoom=}}
- place - this is the name of the template; don't modify it, don't put an equals sign by it!
- name - official name of the city
- type - city, town, area, etc.
- area - country or region (used to make it easier to search for the place)
- image (optional) - the filename of a map image uploaded to the wiki. Initially you can leave this blank.
- lat - latitude of the place, in degrees
- long - longitude of the place, in degrees. Use a minus sign for western hemisphere, e.g. USA
- zoom - zoom level used to see the whole area in the OpenStreetMap.org viewer. Just enter zoom=11 if you don't know
Example:
{{place|name=Bedford|type=town|area=UK|image=Image:Bedford_centre.png|lat=52.15|long=-0.45|zoom=11|moremaps=}}
Save (or preview) the page, and it should be full of information about your town, with links to OpenStreetMaps of the area and various other bits of text describing the place. This is using Template:place
Creating a map image
You can show a map on the page by uploading an image file to the wiki, or using the <map> syntax.
Example:
<map>lat=53.48|lon=-2.24|z=11|w=450|h=380</map>
Place this on the next line below the {{place}} template reference. Obviously lat and lon parameters will ofen be exactly the same as those used for the place template. Likewise with 'z' (the zoom level). The 'w' and 'h' values control the width and height of the map image. Don't go too big, because the image needs to sit comfortably as an illustration at the top of your wiki page. For dinky little image you may want to increase the zoom level by 1 (more zoomed out than in the template reference)
The <map> syntax results in an image which gets automatically updated, as the map develops (generally better!). It can only present a tiles@home rendering at the current time. Mapnik view is not currently available. If the rendering has blocky blue bits, that'll be a coastline problem (you could fix it!)
Uploading an image file
The old way of doing things (which is still widely in use) is to upload an image file into the wiki. This has the major disadvantage that the image is not updated automatically as the map develops. But it does mean you can use Mapnik view, or some other rendering.
Follow instructions at Osmarender to render a pretty map, or use one of the other tools in Category:Outputs, or just take a screenshot of your area on the map. PNG is the format in favour for maps.
Upload the image to the wiki, using the "Upload file" link (bottom left)
Finally edit the wiki page again, and set the image parameter e.g. 'image=Image:Oxford-map.png'
Categorising the city
Add text to the bottom of the page, saying what category the place is in.
Example:
[[Category:UK towns]]
To find a suitable category, look through Category:Places
Meeting local OSM people
If this is your home city, you can add yourself to the list of people in that area using a link on your user page (not the city page!):
[[Category:Users in cityname|yourname]]
That category should then contain at least one link, to your user page. Consider decorating the category page with a link to the city, and by making it a subcategory of Users in (country name)
Other things you can do
If the place has multiple names, alternate spellings, capitalisation, etc., then create redirect pages so that they link to your new page. See Help:Editing for how to do that.
If there's a wikiproject for your country (see Category:Projects for a list, or Mapping projects page), then add your town to that page
Consider adding the map to the Wikipedia article on that place; some examples are listed in the OpenStreetMap category on Wikipedia
Further information
- Any problems, ask on the mailing list or other contact channels
