WikiMapia

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Not to be confused with Wikimaps or Wikimedia.
WikiMapia
Wikimapia.png
WikiMapia as seen in Firefox with fullscreen mode
URL www.wikimapia.org
Slogan Let's describe the whole world!
Commercial? Yes
Type of site Collaborative mapping
Registration Optional
Available language(s) 101 languages, including English
Content license Creative Commons(by-nc-sa). [1]
Created by Alexandre Koriakine and Evgeniy Saveliev
Launched May 24, 2006; 5 years ago (2006-05-24)
Alexa rank negative increase 1,593 (May 2012)[2]
Revenue From AdSense
Current status Active

WikiMapia is a privately owned, online map and satellite imaging resource that combines Google Maps with a wiki system, allowing users to add information, in the form of a note, to any location on Earth.[3] Users may currently use this information for free.[4] Inspired by the success of Google Maps and Wikipedia, two Russian Internet entrepreneurs Alexandre Koriakine and Evgeniy Saveliev launched the website on May 24, 2006.[5] Its aim is to "describe the whole world". It now has over 15,000,000 places marked.[6] Although registration is not required to edit or add to WikiMapia, over 1,600,000 users[7] from around the world currently are registered.[8] All content uploaded by users is currently made available under Creative Commons license for non-commercial use through WikiMapia API.[9] Approximately 1,000 new users register everyday.

Contents

[edit] How Wikimapia works

Wikimapia website provides Google Maps API-based interactive web map that consists of user-generated information layer on top of Google Maps satellite imagery and other resources. It allows to select any marked object and view its description. Apart from this and the search tool, user can filter and highlight objects by categories.

User can add location by drawing its outline on top of satellite photo, write a description for it, choose its category and upload referring pictures. Editing existing tags is possible for registered users only.

Linear features, i.e. roads, railroads and rivers, can also be drawn and provided with description and photos.

In December 2009 Wikimapia launched an API and made its content available in several formats for non-commercial use.

Wikimapia map can also be embedded on other websites.

Another feature that helps editing and exploring the information on Wikimapia is a watchlist system. Any user can choose and save a certain area to monitor changes of the map.

Wikimapia is a multi-lingual website and supports 101 languages. Every tag can have separate description on any of them. The interface is also being translated by users. When a visitor comes to Wikimapia, system automatically sets default language interface and offers list of languages in drop-down menu.

A small administrators team is maintaining and developing Wikimapia. They introducе new features and determine further evolution course. These and overall Wikimapia improvements are influenced by users as well through discussions on forum or reports and requests on issue tracking system.

[edit] Article quality in Wikimapia

Wikimapia users can add any information that seems valuable. This is the reason why articles may contain personal impression of a place, advices, notes of admonition, recommendations or else debatable information. So users should be aware that not all articles are of encyclopedic standard from the start. But it does not necessarily reduce value of Wikimapia data, for it is in its concept that a private opinion based on personal experience can be useful and up-to-date too. Besides, Wikimapia is constantly being improved by users themselves.

[edit] Community

The community of Wikimapia users is largely self-organizing. But there is a rating system based on experience points, which users gain for every action according to its complexity. The system is supposed to encourage adding new information and preventing disruption or vandalism which are common problems of a crowd-sourcing project. While a person attains experience points the system provides him\her an access to new features or eases the restrictions to carry out certain actions.

If a person has built a reputation as a competent editor he/she might get a proposal to become a moderator. In such case he/she will receive some extra authority to help newcomers, monitor the map and ban a user as appropriate.

Wikimapia also operates a forum, where most discussions take place.

[edit] Clutter and filtering

In some areas of the world with out-of-date or very expensive mapping, such as in the case of developing countries, WikiMapia growth has been phenomenally rapid. This rapid growth brought problems of its own, however. Urban areas became covered with thousands of overlapping rectangles marking the positions of private residences, but there was no provision in the WikiMapia interface for distinguishing those residences from places of public interest.

[edit] Licensing

December 2010 WikiMapia announced[10] that all the content is now available under Creative Commons licence 3.0(by-nc-sa) through the API. Because the WikiMapia's geo-located data is all built based on aerial imagery from Google Maps, the dataset (and any further derivations from it) may attract copyright as a "derived work". This will depend on jurisdiction, and generally is an unclear area of copyright law, but the principle allows aerial photography companies to license (at great expense) the right to derive geo-data from their imagery. Although Google have not been known to sue for copyright violation in the courts over use of aerial imagery, their terms of service do include provisions regarding their rights over derived data. The approach taken by WikiMapia is in contrast with a more clean-room "from scratch" re-mapping approach as followed by the OpenStreetMap project.

[edit] Business model

The site generates some income using Google ads.

[edit] Interoperability

Limited WikiMapia functionality is available on:

  • Google Earth, using Google Earth dynamic layer in KML file.[11]
  • Any HTML webpage, using code for a map frame which can be found on the top menu, under "WikiMapia:Map on your page"
  • Most Java-enabled cellphones using 3rd party software such as Mobile GMaps.
  • iPhone application.[12]

[edit] See also

Portal icon Atlas portal

[edit] References

  1. ^ Wikimapia.org
  2. ^ "Wikimapia.org Site Info". Alexa Internet. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikimapia.org. Retrieved 2012-05-02. 
  3. ^ Bear, David (2007-01-07). "Getting a bird's-eye view of any place on Earth". Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07007/751307-96.stm. Retrieved 2007-11-13. 
  4. ^ "Wikimapia Terms of Service". http://wikimapia.org/terms_reference.html. Retrieved 2010-12-10. 
  5. ^ Mount, Nick; Paul Aplin, and Gary Priestnall (2008). Representing, Modeling, and Visualizing the Natural Environment. CRC Press. p. 271. ISBN 1420055496. http://books.google.com/books?id=_copvxkM3n8C&pg=PA271&dq=Alexandre+Koriakine#v=onepage&q=Alexandre%20Koriakine&f=false. 
  6. ^ "Wikimapia Main Page". http://wikimapia.org. Retrieved 2010-01-24.  (See bottom right corner)
  7. ^ [1]
  8. ^ "Wikimapia user statistics page". http://www.wikimapia.org/sys/user_stats/?order=rating&sort=desc. Retrieved 2010-12-10. 
  9. ^ "Wikimapia Terms of Service". 2010-12-10. http://wikimapia.org/terms_reference.html. Retrieved 2010-12-10. 
  10. ^ "Wikimapia Blog: Wikimapia content is now available under Creative Commons License". http://blog.wikimapia.org/node/33. Retrieved 2010-12-10. 
  11. ^ Wikimapia.org
  12. ^ Mifki.com

[edit] External links

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