[OSM-talk] Fwd: [Maps-l] Public API for Wikimedia map tiles to be discontinued in 45 days

Andy Mabbett andy at pigsonthewing.org.uk
Thu Aug 27 18:19:28 UTC 2020


Foarwarding for interest; of course WMF tiles use OSM data:


---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Erica Litrenta <elitrenta at wikimedia.org>
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2020 at 18:33
Subject: [Maps-l] Public API for Wikimedia map tiles to be
discontinued in 45 days
To: <maps-l at lists.wikimedia.org>


 Today the Wikimedia Foundation is announcing the deprecation of the
public API for Wikimedia map tiles. Around mid October the Foundation
will end support for the Wikimedia Maps Service API [1]. This change
affects people using Wikimedia maps on their own website or app. Maps
on the Wikimedia sites, in Wikimedia-hosted tools and gadgets, and on
maps.wikimedia.org won't be affected.

This decision was made based on recent outage incidents, primarily due
to spikes in third party usage, along with an analysis showing that
more than a third of maps provided are to non-Wikimedia services
(including many to for-profit organizations).


After the most recent incident [2], the service was limited so that
only cached maps tiles would be available. While this protected the
servers, it made the service unpredictable and highlighted the
unsustainability of our tile service. So, we have made the decision to
discontinue the maps APIs for non-Wikimedia users.


This change will allow our teams working on Maps to focus on the
sustainability of the maps used within Wikimedia projects.


You can follow the implementation of this change on Phabricator [3].


Best,

Erica Litrenta

[1] https://maps.wikimedia.org/osm-intl/

[2] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Incident_documentation/20200204-maps

[3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T261424

-- 
Erica Litrenta
Manager, Community Relations Specialists
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Elitre_(WMF)

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-- 
Andy Mabbett
@pigsonthewing
http://pigsonthewing.org.uk



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