Collaboration with Wikipedia
From OpenStreetMap
Wikipedia the free encyclopaedia, has been an inspiration for many design aspects of OpenStreetMap, but it also offers a lot of scope for cross-project collaboration.
- There is obvious immediate potential for illustrating Wikipedia articles with rendered maps (This is the main area to focus on)
- We already link from OSM wiki to Wikipedia
- There is already a certain amount of linking from Wikipedia to OSM
- We could also link to Wikipedia articles from within the OSM map data
- We have a page describing OSM on Wikipedia
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Why collaborate?
OpenStreetMap stands to benefit. We increase awareness and drive user traffic to OSM. Ultimately we want people to use OpenStreetMap, but at this stage we are particularly interested in attracting more mappers and more developers.
Wikipedia stands to benefit. Linking to street maps is all very well, but a lot of articles about places can be enhanced by having map images embedded alongside the text. OpenStreetMap is the best way to do this, while still presenting only open licensed content on the page (In fact it's almost the only way)
Wikipedia WikiProject
There is a WikiProject page on Wikipedia which should provide guidance to Wikipedians on how to create map images for use in wikipedia articles. Hopefully this process will be easy enough to be followed for many wikipedia articles.
That page also describes a number of useful templates within WikiPedia, e.g. for labelling OpenStreetMap map images, and also categories that relate to OpenStreetMap.
Note the project page is in addition to the actual Wikipedia article about OpenStreetMap.
Illustrating Wikipedia articles with rendered maps
This is the main area where there's lots of obvious potential. We should get onto Wikipedia and upload images to illustrate some of the articles describing places.
Wikipedians will take offense if we plaster lots of low quality images on there. Obviously we need to pick only areas where we have achieved a good level of mapping coverage, and where the rendering comes out well to produced maps which are actually useful. Note that we can upload quite large images, but it is preferred that an image looks good and is useful in it's thumbnailed form, appearing on the article page itself. For maps this might mean the street name text should be readable in the thumbnail. That is actually quite a tricky restriction to work with (pick zoom level and thumbnail size carefully)
The image description page for any such image, must mention the CC-BY-SA license, and attribute the image to OpenStreetMap, but this is also a good place to provide good links to openstreetmap. See #Linking from Wikipedia to OSM below.
Logo requirement
We maybe need to decide to what extent we require in-image attribution (OSM logos). This might involve spelling out our exact interpretation of the OpenStreetMap License. Or perhaps we just spell out the "preferred" approach involving adding the logo. From Wikipedia's point of view, it's probably preferred to not have the logo, so we should be clear on this.
Technical enhancement to Wikipedia
Wikipedia supports image uploads already, so we should get stuck in and start using this to illustrate articles, but as a future possibility, wikipedia could support a more intelligent embedded map feature powered by OpenStreetMap. We have several MediaWiki extensions available to download. The Simple image MediaWiki Extension, pointed via the wikimedia squid proxies, would be a reasonable recommendation.
Obviously these things need careful assessment by wikipedia people before they roll them out across wikipedia. Tim Starling, lead mediawiki developer and wikipedia administrator, saw a talk by User:Steve and was enthusiastic about these possibilities. That was before the MediaWiki extensions were developed, but also before WikiMiniAtlas came along.
WikiMiniAtlas
Somebody has already gone to considerable effort to develop something called WikiMiniAtlas for wikipedia, and it was put in place relatively recently. This provides a slippy map display as a dropdown feature at the top of the page, for those articles which have been geotagged. The map data is drawn from various free sources... but they're not as good as OpenStreetMap!
We should definitely work with the developers to get our map data represented on there somehow (if not our maps full stop) They should be amenable to the idea, since our maps are good, but also our maps are getting better through wiki style community contributions (sharing the same philosophy as wikipedia).
The arrival of WikiMiniAtlas takes the wind out of the sails of the MediaWiki Extensions we have here, but doesn't devalue them completely. These extensions embed an map within the article text. It's good to have both.
The developer of WikiMiniAtlas (Dschwen, also User:Dschwen)has been contacted, and he will look into it as soon he will have some time after other obligations. He is aware of OpenStreetMap. Some software changes on WikiMiniAtlas are needed before deployment.
OSM.JS
At the german wikipedia it is now possible with osm.js to open an OSM iframe in each article which have a coordinate. See: [1] (german Mailinglist).
WP-on-OSM
It would be nice to have the datas from Wikipedia-World-Project as an OpenLayers_Dynamic_POI over OSM. Who can help? I (User:Kolossos) can provide the Wikipedia-datas. wp-on-osm is one one step in the direction but with google in backround.
Just a bunch of images
A slightly brute-force idea, but here it is: wikipedia:Wikipedia:WikiProject OpenStreetMap/Town maps
Query-to- map
See Query-to-map. The next step would be the inclusion of an openlayers element with special paths into the mediawiki.
Link from OSM wiki to Wikipedia
We already do this on many of our Places pages (pages linked from the Mapping projects page).
Many of them using Template:Place, which includes a Wikipedia link. In other cases we should just add a link in the text.
Linking from Wikipedia to OSM
The best place to link from Wikipedia to OSM is on image description pages for the map images we upload there. It's a good idea to link to the map, with a 'permalink' pointing at the relevant place on the map (URL with lat/lon/zoom)
The image description page must mentiont the CC-BY-SA license we use. It might also be a good idea to link to the OpenStreetMap License page here on this wiki.
To simplify setting up image descriptions there are various templates which you might like to use. See wikipedia:Wikipedia:WikiProject OpenStreetMap#Templates
sl wikipedia has some templates set up too : List of streets in Ljubljana (using a template)
Link to Wikipedia articles from within the OSM map data
We can link features of the map (especially "Place" nodes) to Wikipedia articles.
We need to define the exact tagging approach for this. It is a "proposed feature", meaning that some people may already be tagging their map data with Wikipedia links, but the preferred format for this, has not been finalised. See Proposed features/External links#Wikipedia.
The discussion ties in with tagging ideas for external links in general.
How these links might be rendered/used, is a something else still to work on. Uses may well pop up in external tools/websites, and maybe in the future we might see something clever added to the OSM Slippy Map. Google style 'pins' with links for example.
