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Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Maps/OSM map problem on dewiki

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OSM map problem on dewiki

  • Problem: The Geohack tool on dewiki does not use updated coordinates after update.
  • Who would benefit: all users of dewiki calling up the OSM map of any article (which is systematically displaying the initial coordinates)
  • Proposed solution:
  • More comments: already requested earlier (e.g. [1], [2])
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: --Stopfentrudel (talk) 13:44, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Compare for de:Wikipedia:Technische Wünsche/Topwünsche/OSM-Verknüpfungen besser warten: There are many map-related issues in dewiki that, excuse my language, actually are not being cared about. → «« Man77 »» [de] 15:43, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Specific steps which allow someone else to see the same problem would be super welcome: There is "MediaWiki:GeoHack.js" on some sites, there are https://tools.wmflabs.org/geohack/ or https://tools.wmflabs.org/wiwosm/ , "Template:GeoTemplate" on some sites, and a few more Map related things around, so I'd love to make sure that we're talking about exactly the same thing. Thanks! --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 17:25, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
You find these specific steps in the proposal, under "more comments". --Stopfentrudel (talk) 18:21, 4 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
A lot of the volunteer maintained maps are a bit in disarray. Most of the volunteers working on that stuff have sort of moved on to different things and a new generation of volunteers has not really materialised. In the mean time, stuff keeps changing around what was built and many of these things slowly break down left and right. Some of these would be easily solvable, others not. There are the production maps of WMF, which have their problems, but at least are a production level service with production level support. To make use of this however, requires people giving up on existing integrations, which the communities seem often reluctant to do. And some of the volunteer services aren't even yet available as WMF services (for instance 'nearby' map layers). As a matter of fact though, the tile servers for some of those maps even need to be updated, because if they are not, they will stop working in january altogether, yet so far no one has shown indications of being willing to work on that. Lots of opportunities here, but hard to navigate this space. Like, do you want WMF to patch up a tool ? Or do you want them to maintain it ? Or do you want to switch to next generation maps ? These are questions that need to be answered by communities. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:43, 5 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
@Stopfentrudel: I had read what's under "more comments" and it was and is unclear to me which exact buttons or links were clicked where. --AKlapper (WMF) (talk) 12:28, 5 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Take de:Municipio Tequisquiapan as example (click the link in this line)
  • In the top right corner, depending on your personal settings, but usually below the place where you click to log off from your account, at the same height as the lemma you should see "Koordinaten: 20° 30′ N, 99° 54′ W", followed by two symbols (one in green with a magnifier symbol, one in blue like a globe with a black triangle). Click the green symbol.
  • A map should have loaded. In this map there are two things missing:
    • The WIWOSM connex should have displayed this outline in the very map that opened. This is currently not the case because the database has not been updated for ages even though according to user:Kolossos this ought to happen daily and automatically. Open the same map in de:Querétaro (Bundesstaat) to see how this outline should de displayed.
    • The map lacks information about other articles which were created after a day X (indeed very very long ago, longer than the last update of problem 1). If you zoom out a little, about 30 km to the northeast of the coordinate in our article you should see a pin with a W which marks the place the article de:Zimapán-Talsperre is describing, 20 km to the north there is a red square for de:Bernal (Mexiko). Younger articles like de:Tequisquiapan virtually next to our example, or de:San Juan del Río (Querétaro) some 15 km to the southwest are not marked. This is increasingly painful, as the map and our stock of articles are extremely out of sync.
This is not merely a dewiki problem. Other wikis like eswiki or itwiki which use WIWOSM have the same issues.
→ «« Man77 »» [de] 17:38, 5 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
To the two points above:
  • We should test if we could change from WIWOSM to Kartographer-Objects (e.g. https://maps.wikimedia.org/geoshape?getgeojson=1&ids=Q797). For this smaller change I would only need to determine the Wikidata-ID inside my map script. Second problem is perhaps map projection and the need for a proxy. It's a smaller change and perhaps done with some help from an JavaScript-Programmer in some hours.
  • Database updates are an other problem as the sql queries that I run in the past are now much slower and break more often, so I stop the last update after 2 days of frustration. (Same frustration like with my other project templatiger [3]. Other users are also frustrated...) So in my eyes I will not further work on that and say that all objects created after 2016 are not relevant for the map. Sorry for that. It would be much easier to extract coordinates from Wikidata instead of different Wikipedias, but than all objects inside of list would missing. This could be an option to can switch between one old layer from Wikipedia or an updated layer from Wikidata.
My problem is that the WMF has no clue what to do with maps. Where is a map in the mobil app, where it is needed mostly, and not only a nearby map but also a map around each article. And where is a user concept and an clean up for maps... Where are the innovative ideas from WMF about maps where is a contact person to talk about maps? Without such a plan I feel it's more more and more a waste of time. --Kolossos (talk) 15:15, 6 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
The answer to this is basically "no budget"/"no people". With day to day maintenance and several key long term strategy projects, the foundation (and WMDE) are 'full'. Scaling beyond the current levels requires investing more in engineering and past feedback has shown very little support for additional investments from the community (and management honestly). So officially, YOU can determine the direction. The problem is that you need to keep to WMF rules about code quality, stability and scaling and find another person of equal level to approve your code changes. And considering you also need additional services, you probably also need to be a sysop. And honestly that is asking too much of most volunteers. It's why I generally tend to limit myself to bug fixing. But please take the Kartographer project in phabricator and comment on every single ticket with your opinion. Please DO draw mockups and provide a white paper with commentary on how things SHOULD be working. And please do keep pushing the foundation. Also please consider that there are currently a LOT of things out there already. In situations where there is a lot of differences in technology between the various wikis, then the foundation has learned it takes 6months to a year to get significant changes through to the communities. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:59, 7 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]
In addition to making it into the "Topwünsche" list of dewiki in 2015 (mentioned above), the proposal had another 19 votes last year on dewiki. [4] --Stopfentrudel (talk) 10:01, 22 November 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Voting

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