Report from the Wikimania Conference

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(Kurzer Bericht von der Wikimania Konferenz auf deutsch)

Wikipedians, Wiki enthusiasts, interested individuals and a whole bunch of press people met from August 5th to 6th at the Wikimania conference in Frankfurt, Germany. Especially for many of the Wikipedians it was also their first meeting in real life. The conference program gave a great overview of activities within and around Wikipedia.

The broad collection of Wikimedia projects obviously made up the main part of the program. Discussions touched governance, new projects, license policies, funding and software development.

Nonetheless all the keynote talks could be referenced to spatial contexts, though often on more generic level. Have a look at the Wikimania Program Abstracts to get an overview. Read my memory comments on each:

Spatial data and maps are of high interest for the Wikipedia project. Without having them solved all at once it will not really be possible to start Wikimaps.

  • must cover the whole world right from the start
  • must be GNU/FDL compatible
  • must be politically correct (don't even think about NPOV)
  • must have a full history (map?, feature?, pixel?, everything?)
  • should be fairly detailed
  • should be really easy to use (explainable to your grandma)

Until Wikimaps takes off nobody will be able to start wiki-edit any spatial data. Until then things can and should be done, some of them are already well under way:

  • tagging of articles
  • standardized architectures
  • license policies
  • cartographic design.

The Wikimaps pages are hosted on Meta. The corresponding discussion page contains a proposal for a Wikimaps Architecture. This is only one of the disjointed discussions going on about geographic coordinates, geo coding, geo tagging, gps tracking, SVG maps, coordinate systems, map cartography, etc. on Wikipedia.

The basic issue is that Wikipedia will probably "have to" (must) store all information on their own servers for governance reasons (keeping track and hold of everything). This will reduce the potential for special map pages a lot as it will not be possible that way to link into any external map service.

But there might be a loophole in providing external links (which is fine with Wikipedia policy). If these links are a set of OGC WMS getMaps, maybe organized in a web context document then it will be easy to add them with one mouse klick to any map that resides on a Wikipedia server. So basically Wikipedia just has to link into a set of comprehensive Catalog Services and provide an easy to use front end to consume the services and data provided.

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