[talk-ph] WIWOSM: Wikipedia Where in OpenStreetMap

Eugene Alvin Villar seav80 at gmail.com
Thu Mar 22 15:40:29 GMT 2012


Hi guys,

There's a new project that aims to bring more collaboration between
OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia called WIWOSM (Wikipedia Where in
OpenStreetMap):
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WIWOSM

To quickly see what this is all about, check out the German Wikipedia
where WIWOSM has been pushed live for testing. Go to the article about
the Ateneo de Manila University on the German Wikipedia[1] and then
click on the "Karte" (German for "map") link on the upper-right corner
of the article. You will then see a pop-on map showing OSM as the
basemap, but with one thing new: a polygon overlay displaying the
corresponding object in OSM. Neat!


== The state before ==

There has been limited activities bridging OSM and Wikipedia before,
but most of them operate in one project independently of the other.


=== OSM in Wikipedia ===

* In some Wikipedias where the pop-on map has been installed (like the
German Wikipedia; sadly not the English Wikipedia where the traffic is
too big to be handled) the pop-on map uses OSM as the basemap

* Some Wikipedians use OSM as the source for creating static maps.
Either the map was created using the OSM map tiles like the map of the
Costa Concordia disaster[2], or the raw OSM data was used to create a
brand new map, such as this map of Louisville, Kentucky[3].

* Wikipedia articles can be geotagged. An example is shown on the
English Wikipedia article on the Manila Observatory[4], where you can
see the coordinates on the upper-right corner. This brings up a link
to the Geohack web page[5] that lets you see where the coordinate is
on various online maps such as Google Maps and OpenStreetMap. The big
limitation is that articles can only have a single point for
geotagging. So whether the article is about a country or a building,
you can only associate it with a single point on the map.


=== Wikipedia in OSM ===

* Objects in OpenStreetMap can have a tag (wikipedia=*) specifying the
corresponding Wikipedia article. An example is the OSM polygon for the
Ateneo de Manila University[6].


== What WIWOSM adds ==

Because Wikipedia's system of geotagging articles with just a single
coordinate does not really show the geographical extent of the
article's subject, using the existing OpenStreetMap shape/data for the
subject seems obvious. That's what WIWOSM does: it shows the actual
shape of the subject, using OSM instead of just a point location.

How do we make WIWOSM work (at least for the Wikipedias where it is deployed)?

1. Make sure that the Wikipedia article is geotagged first (so that a
map link will be shown).

2. Make sure that the OpenStreetMap object has the wikipedia=* tag.[7]

And after the OSM database in Wikipedia's toolserver has been updated,
the WIWOSM maps will also be updated.


Cheers,
Eugene


[1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ateneo_de_Manila_University
[2] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Location_of_Costa_Concordia_cruise-ship_disaster_%2813-1-2012%29.png
[3] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Louisville_%28Kentucky%29_map-fr.svg
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_Observatory
[5] http://toolserver.org/~geohack/geohack.php?pagename=Manila_Observatory&params=14.63667_N_121.07667_E_type:landmark_source:USNO/HMNAO
[6] http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/138294127
[7] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:wikipedia



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