[OSM-talk] Map tag in Wikipedia

[Lars Aronsson]

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote:

> Just installing an extension on Wikimedia and pulling tiles from 
> OSM would not be acceptable:
> 
> * Wikimedia would need its own updated Planet dump
> * Its own tile rendering infrastructure

At first I thought that these requirements were natural, but are 
they really?  If someone already renders tiles, why should someone 
else need to render the same tile again?  Wouldn't it be easier to 
copy the generated tiles than to render them again?  And since the 
tiles are static PNGs, shouldn't a squid web proxy be sufficient 
to handle the bandwidth?

Wikipedia's servers are in Florida. For readers in Europe, there 
is a squid proxy in Amsterdam. Make a "dig en.wikipedia.org" and 
see if your DNS points to rr.esams.wikimedia.org where "AMS" is 
for Amsterdam.

It's another issue if Wikipedia wants a different rendering, 
perhaps tiles without names, in order to place Wikipedia links as 
an overlay.

> * It would have to be accessible and not just availible to JS 
>   enabled browsers

I'm not sure I understand this. Are you talking about users that 
don't want to use JavaScript?  Is this requirement different for 
Wikipedia.org than for OpenStreetMap.org?

> * It would have to work with the static dumps 
>   (http://static.wikipedia.org/)

Now that is a special requirement!  Could you generate static HTML 
that uses <table> and <div> to line up some static PNG tiles in a 
static HTML page?  Would this also solve the problem for browsers 
without JavaScript?

And what about people who want to generate PDF for printing 
Wikipedia articles in high resolution.  Maybe we need to provide 
SVG images as well as tiles.  Are there SVG tiles?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se