Collaboration with Wikipedia
- For key description, see key:wikipedia.
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
- There is an article about OpenStreetMap on Wikipedia
2009 starts the OpenStreetMap-Wikimedia cooperation. 1 server was installed with OSM stuff inside wikimedia cluster (toolserver). Most active is the mailing list maps-l and Toolserver-Wiki .
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 an (inactive) 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 its 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.
Attribution requirement
Map images from OSM are (currently) covered by the OpenStreetMap License, and so require attribution. In recent years, as we have seen more uses, it has been more widely accepted that reasonable attribution does not necessarily need to appear on the map. Applying this to Wikipedia, it would seem to fit that wiki sites should give plenty of attribution on the image description page (e.g.), but no need for any in-image attribution. This is in line with Wikipedia's community norms for giving credit to image sources. However this is only a statement of what seems to be widely accepted. Details of our attribution requirement are open to interpretation and therefore highly debatable. Some more general details can be found on the Legal FAQ.
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.
OSM-integration
At the German Wikipedia and others (no.wp, fr.wp and ru.wp) it is now possible for everyone to open an OSM iframe in each article which have a coordinate. See: Wikipedia:Help:OpenStreetMap and follow the mailing list maps-l mailing list. This feature shows Wikipedia articles on the OSM map. This data comes from Wikipedia-World-Project and you can use this map also as standalone WP-on-OSM map.
Geohack for OSM
With Geohack for OSM we link to many OSM-maps for one place. This page is accessible from Wikipedia over the normal geohack and over the OSM-Wiki.
Query-to- map
See Query-to-map. The next step would be the inclusion of an openlayers element with special paths into the mediawiki.
Quick links to OSM
See quick links to Google Maps, Yandex Maps and OpenStreetMap from Template:Coord in Russian Wikipedia.
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 mention 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)
Some wikipedia articles, like rivers and long streets, may be enhanced by linking to the OSM object, for example wikipedia:Jukskei River.
Wikipedia Users Pages
Place {{User OSM}} on your Wikipedia user page.
Link to Wikipedia articles from within the OSM map data
We can link features of the map (especially "Place" nodes) to Wikipedia articles.
See Key:wikipedia.
How these links might be rendered/used, is a something people can decide on their own external projects/websites. The obvious use would be 'pins' with links on a Slippy Map. For Wikipedia it would be interesting to draw the real OSM-objects (that were linked to Wikipedia-article) in a map inside the Wikipedia-article.
Other usages will be translations by using Wikipedia Interwikilinks or to exchange other data.
A tool to create such links is JOSM/Plugins/RemoteControl/Add-tags.
Using pictures from Wikipedia for tag description/Map_Features
Auto importing of images from Wikimedia commons is now enabled on this wiki. If you enter an [[Image:xxxxx]] reference matching the name of any image in wikimedia's "commons" repository, then it gets used within the wiki complete with remote image description details. You can use pictures from Wikipedia if the license is Public Domain or CC-BY as well as CC-BY-SA. Simply reference the name of an image if it is in commons. Other images can be uploaded explicitly, but you must copy the license text and the original author's name onto our wiki image description page. A link to the original picture is also required.
Note: The license of the OSM-Wiki is CC-BY-SA, and we have more strict community acceptance criteria regarding map images. You are NOT allowed to use pictures with GNU-License like GFDL or GPL. In this case you can contact the author and ask if he wants to make his picture available in CC-BY-SA for osm. You should probably not use any map image from wikimedia, even where they are pronounced cc-by-sa on wikipedia, because this community applies more strict criteria regarding derivative works.
Importing geodata from Wikipedia
Wikipedia articles are often geocoded, and it has been suggested a number of times that we should import data from wikipedia (for example, using the pages on villages in a particular country to add place=village nodes). However, it is believed that a proportion of wikipedia's coordinate data is derived from Google Maps, and so isn't actually available under the stated license. For this reason, it is an established principle in OpenStreetMap that we don't import geodata from wikipedia.
There seems a high potential to use the interwikilinks of Wikipedia to translate geographical objects in different languages. Also other data like the population of a city could be check with help of Wikipedia. For such a usage there should be no legal problems.
Importing place names from Wikipedia
OSM-Wikipedia place name tool adds semi-automatically new name:XX values to Openstreetmap using wikipedia links from OSM and interlanguage links from the Wikipedias.
Toolserver activities
The rules on http://toolserver.org are now so that OpenStreetMap- developer have the same rights like developer for wikimedia projects[1]. So every developer is very welcome to request an account. There is also a list of projects on toolsever.
