Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Maps

Related WikiProjects

The parent of this WikiProject is the Geography WikiProject. WikiProject Maps also is a management type WikiProject for pictorial representations displayed within Wikipedia. The following illustrates the position of WikiProject Maps within the Wikipedia WikiProject lineage:

Extended content

Wikipedia maintenance WikiProject Graphics Creation/improvement of pictorial representations displayed within Wikipedia WikiProject Photography - Create and improve photographs WikiProject Panorama Welding - stitching photos together to create a panorama Photo Matching Service Requested pictures WikiProject Maps - Create geographical maps WikiProject OpenStreetMap - Create maps using data from OpenStreetMap WikiProject Geographical coordinates - Create map coordinates WikiProject Indian maps - Create maps for India-related articles WikiProject Mathematics/Graphics - Create graphics for math-related articles Graphic Lab - Improve graphical content stored on Commons and Wikipedia WikiProject Illustration - Create and improve illustrations Philip Greenspun illustration project. Create and improve illustrations on Wikimedia Acquisition of pictorial representations displayed within Wikipedia WikiProject Free book covers - Acquire covers about books in the public domain Distribution of pictorial representations displayed within Wikipedia WikiProject Animated Wikipedia - Distribute Wikipedia stored animated video in Wikipedia WikiProject Free images - Distribute Wikipedia stored free images in Wikipedia. WikiProject Moving free images to Wikimedia Commons - Move Wikipedia stored free images to Commons. Commons:WikiProject Atlas - Organize maps included in commons as an atlas Monitoring of pictorial representations displayed within Wikipedia WikiProject Graphics monitoring WikiProjects that have made use of geographical maps include: Wikipedia:WikiProject Countries Wikipedia:WikiProject Former countries Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Counties Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. States Wikipedia:WikiProject Tree of Life and its subprojects (distribution maps for animals/plants/etc)

Help with an Infobox map

I am having a difficult time with the Infobox map on Blob's Park. I followed the guidelines on Template:Infobox map but that did not seem to work. Any help would be appreciated. LarryGrim (talk) 12:49, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

I got it for you, switched to a different template and it worked. Kmusser (talk) 14:02, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. That got it. So simple when it is done. So difficult to do alone. LarryGrim (talk) 18:49, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Seeking critique & advice

Please let me know if there's a more appropriate venue in which to ask this. I'm looking for constructive critiques of a series of maps I'm creating. These are maps of reservoirs that were never built, which will illustrate an expanded article I plan to write on the defunct Meramec Basin Project.

• 
  Meramec Park Lake
• 
  Pine Ford Lake
• 
  Union Lake
• 
  Irondale Lake
• 
  Virginia Mines Lake
• 
  Salem Lake

I'm planning on another couple of maps for major reservoirs that were proposed for a second phase of the project, plus one of the full basin showing them all in relation to each other and the basin. --Kbh3^rdtalk 17:32, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Simply Awesome... the best topographic maps created on the English Graphic lab. Yug (talk) 18:11, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

That certainly is not true. Overall these aren't bad, IMHO, but I'm looking for real expert guidance on what details need more attention and tweaking in some manner. --Kbh3^rdtalk 23:32, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Those look great, I think they'd be fine as is. If you have it, it would be cool to show the existing river course going through the reservoirs (but keep it subtle, a light blue dashed line perhaps). I'd probably also use regular case for the water feature labels and reserve the all caps for just the counties, but that's a personal preference. Kmusser (talk) 14:45, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

For deeper comments...

1. You map a small area, so you have neither the misleading north-arrow issue, nor the misleading scale issue. I suspect however that the grey lines indicate the real north (see File:Meramec Park Lake propose v4.svg).

2. Background is SVG, which is great (how did you make that ? which soft / script ?)

3. Colors are smooth thanks to the conventions.

4. I didn't remembered that rivers should have darker borders, but I guess you considered the big zoom justifies to look at rivers are water area rather than water lines.

Suggestions: I may suggest you to enlarge a bit the frames. More interesting : to create an overall locator map to localize each frame. See File:Metacomet_Ridge_map-fr.svg. Yug (talk) 19:23, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Good points. Response per each:

1. Most of these were done in UTM 15N, and the area is towards the eastern limit of that zone, which causes north to tilt to the left. The last one (Virginia Mines) was done in the Missouri East state plane which has that problem to a much lesser degree for this area. I may recast all the maps in that projection. The north arrow, particularly the one from the template, doesn't do much good when the deviation from vertical is slight. I included and oriented it in the Meramec Park Lake map, and it's also in the Union Lake map, though I think that was by accident.

2. I use Quantum GIS to render the topographic background and export it as a bitmap. I use Inkscape's bitmap tracer to translate that into SVG. That function is available in a standalone utility, too, though I don't remember the name. The lakes, roads, streams, and towns are from shapefile data, after I've derived the lakes' shapefile from the elevation data, and are rendered to SVG with shptosvg, which I wrote. I've gotten my techniques pretty well nailed down while working on this series and have been considering posting a step-by-step tutorial, both to help others learn and to garner suggestions for better methods.

3. Using all 19 colors of the convention creates too unwieldy an SVG file, given how they're rendered by the bitmap tracer, and that number isn't necessary for the range of elevations here, so I cut it down to those shown. In most I chose the first n colors, but in the Meramec Park Lake map I used every other color. I think I may adjust that to be the same as the other maps.

4. Yes, I realize it goes against the convention, but I believe that the streams as shown look better in these maps. That's how they're shown on USGS topo maps, and the scale here is similar or even smaller.

I love a map full of details into which I can dive. But topographic details are more easily gleaned from a shaded relief map, I think, than the flat color used here. I don't have a technique for an effective shaded relief map in pure SVG, though. I may make shaded bitmap versions of each of these, as I did for the Pine Ford map. The Metacomet Ridge map you reference is very interesting and well done. I am going to make a map of the whole basin with all these maps shown in context, but I don't think I'll include each of these as insets because it ossifies the presentation -- all these maps as well as the area map can be included and arranged individually in the article I have in mind.

Thanks for the useful feedback, and more welcomed. --Kbh3^rdtalk 20:25, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Feedback regarding the descriptions, not the content: It would be useful to have more metadata noted, such as the projection used, co-ordinates displayed, scale and so on. Also the source - the map is your own work, but the data its based on isn't.

Regarding the content, I'm not sure about the display of the roads. If the dams had been built the roads would have been interrupted. Given that the lakes are shown as if they had been completed, I think it would be better to show it covering those roads. I wish SVG relief shading was viable too...--Nilfanion (talk) 09:13, 12 September 2012 (UTC)

I added a new map for a reservoir that was proposed for near Salem. Changes in the presentation, based on suggestions here, include: "underwater" roads, added existing lakes and minor streams (presented as simple lines), and projection information and world file on the image description page. Unfortunately, this is near the western edge of the state plane, which causes North to dip to the right; that county line runs east-west. The North arrow is accurate for what it's worth. BTW, Crooked Creek, on the far right, is the namesake of the Crooked Creek crater. --Kbh3^rdtalk 23:47, 13 September 2012 (UTC)

File:Urals blank map.png

File:Urals blank map.png has been suggested that it isn't free and should be deleted -- 76.65.131.248 (talk) 20:50, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Creating a new pushpin map

Main page: Wikipedia:WikiProject Maps/Conventions/Pushpin maps

Are there any instructions on creating a pushpin map?

JASpencer (talk) 23:00, 14 September 2012 (UTC)

Have you something in mind ? (some radom pushpin maps images). I guess we have nothing, but you can suggest us a convention on the same principle that our other Map Conventions. Yug (talk) 14:56, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Benghazi

Cairo

Sana‘a

Tunis

Tripoli

Khartoum

Chennai

Lashkar Gah (Camp Bastion)

class=notpageimage|

Case 2. Location of some of the several dozen attacks and protests.

case 1

I found the 3 cases for wikipedia pinpoint maps.

Case 1: You can draw it completely in SVG, like the Mali map.

Case 2: ({location maps+}

Case 3: make an external google maps. Yug (talk) 15:13, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for your answers. JASpencer (talk) 21:39, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

US place location maps

2012 script generated file.

Greetings all,

Some years ago I generated a large number of SVG maps that are used on numerous US place articles (see [1] for an example). They were a step up from the generic pushpin maps that had been used for some years and for the most part people were happy with them, however these maps are deficient in a number of ways - not the least of which being the fact that they are outdated by 12 years now.

I have been asked from time to time if I planned to do an update on these maps, so I've finally begun looking in to it. I've identified a number of potential upgrades to bring the maps more up to convention as well as adding additional context, based partly on a subset of maps that have been created by User:Ixnayonthetimmay. A test run of the script and some of the potential improvements can be seen at [2], it is obviously lacking the inset window.

Before I move any further with this 'project' I have a few points I'd like to bring up as well as get any potential feedback on how I might be doing thse things better.

• Roads and water features have been added for context. I am slightly concerned that on this scale the size of the roads might in fact be a distraction, so I would love some feedback as to whether or not they should be included. Water features should remain either way, they are particularly useful in coastal regions where the old style map could produce confusing results.

• The maps no longer exist as isolated islands; features that extend out beyond the county lines are displayed.

• I've done my best to conform to convention but there is still some gray area. The previous convention was to show incorporated places as grey and unincorporated places as transparent (no fill). So far I am still going with this old convention but if there is any other suggestions I'm open to hearing them.

• Some derivative versions of these maps show Native American reservation boundaries, but I've left them off. It is my opinion that since the purpose of these maps is to show boundaries for incorporated and unincorporated places (cities and towns, essentially), adding additional jurisdictional boundaries only confuses things. Open to any feedback on these lines.

• Previous discussions regarding minor civil divisions in some states (Michigan, New England Area, etc) indicated that the old maps were deficient for these states. The newer files available from the Census allows the script to treat these as equal to incorporated places so this should not be an issue any longer.

The scripts I have written do most of the hard work but there is still a lot of 'manual labor' involved; inset maps have to be added by hand, for example, as well as some minor fixes to coastal water features. As there are 3000 county and county equivalents in the US, I'd like to get started on the process sooner rather than later if I am to go forward with this, so again, any input or suggestions are quite welcome. Thanks! Shereth 19:02, 18 September 2012 (UTC)

Glad to see you made a post here, and glad to see you went into more detail with resolving the issues with the old maps than I did.

Overall, I think it's essential to have all the maps conform to the same standards and a project like this one will address, once and for all, the inconsistent and sometimes obsolete locator maps for the various Wikipedia U.S. city articles. Regarding the specific points you mentioned:

1.) Roads and water: Roads should be included for exactly the reasons you mentioned. I am not sure the size would be an issue unless the roads will appear 'thinner' on large county maps and 'thicker' on small county maps. I am wondering if there is some way to compensate for that; bump up the thickness of the road paths for larger maps and vice versa, though this is just an aesthetic point.

2.) Context displayed: This will be fine, though I am wondering the effect this will have on cities with significant chunks of incorporated land in adjacent counties. Maybe just take it on a case-by-case basis for the New York Cities out there.

3.) Concentions: This convention regarding unincorporated areas seems to be working. Just a value judgement on my part, but anything we can do to get away from those terrible red dot locator maps will be quite welcome.

4.) Administrative divisions included/excluded: I must confess this norm for showing rez boundaries shows my Arizona bias, and it seemed to just fit for the Maricopa county maps I made lo these many years ago. I must agree that it doesn't make sense to shoe-horn them into the locator maps anymore.

5.) ?: I can't provide any input on the northeastern states issues raised up, but I would like to ask this. Will Midwestern townships and New England "towns" be equivalent to unincorporated places in your map standard?

Cities' planning area: Another point to be addressed is the inclusion of city "planning area" boundaries. This is also another example of my Arizona bias as I am not sure such planning areas exist outside of Arizona (I know places like Texas have extraterritorial jurisdiction boundaries but these are arguably not relevant on such locator maps.) I am fine with not including such "planning area" boundaries, but having the solid black outline on city limits leads to black clutter in the case of particularly jagged city borders and areas with multiple small county islands, as well as overly thick lines on shoestring annexations. I'm not sure what the universal solution to this issue is, but I think it is something to discuss.

If you would like someone to volunteer to help with post-production, I will, though there are some other aesthetic considerations I would like to discuss. But as you mentioned, there are 3000 maps, so it isn't something I could do on my own in any reasonable amount of time. Help would be greatly appreciated!

Ixnayonthetimmay (talk) 05:42, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

That's make about 60 counties by state. It will be need to create and organize a project page on the model of what the Deutsch team created:

• a page by state, one wikitable, one row is one county.
• For each row : county name cell, county base map (script generated), county finished map (with localizator-state miniature).
• file name should be well thinked.

The whole USA doesn't seems needed.

So it would be good that your script also create a log file by State, with all this texts : county name / SVG base map file name / SVG finished map file name.

Some small regex replaces would then finish quickly the conversion into wikitables' syntaxe. Yug (talk) 13:16, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Last:

1. Roads and watters: I don't really like to display roads on administrative location maps,

2. Update: please nest your layers and name them cleanly in the SVG, that may ease update. Yug (talk) 13:16, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Ok, if it would make more sense to move this discussion to a different page then by all means, we should do that; however I confess that I'm not quite understanding the goal or purpose of the state-by-state tables. Would the idea be to have the base maps loaded in, and then once someone manually cleans it up they'd upload it and add it to the table so anyone assisting would know what needs done and what has yet to be done? I guess that'd make good sense. But for now, as to some of the questions/concerns above :

• Roads and water: I can modify the script to dynamically set road widths based on the size of the map, yes, so a standard would have to be set. The downside to this approach would be inconsistent widths when viewing the maps in their 'native' resolution. For a specific example of why I brought this up as a concern, on the above sample map of Maricopa county, Theba (CDP) is almost completely covered up by a road. Not really sure what the ideal solution is. Another issue with roads that I didn't bring up before is that the data set I have (from the US Census) does not accurately distinguish between primary and secondary roads - a controlled access state route built to interstate standards is not differentiated from rural two lane state route.
• Context: Cases like NYC or Kansas City, Missouri, that cross multiple county lines would have to be handled on a case by case basis, but fortunately they are in the minority, not the majority.
• Conventions: I'm also ok with leaving them as-is, just wanted to see if there was any other thoughts regarding unincorporated areas. As far as the issue with the townships is considered, they probably will be lumped in with incorporated places but this is something I would prefer to address on a state by state basis, perhaps seeking input from the relevant state projects. In the past I have gotten a lot of friction with some of these areas because the previous incarnation of the maps did not shade them as if they were incorporated.
• I'm not really sure what is being requested with regards to nesting the layers in the SVG file, but I'm certainly amenable to suggestions making the file structure itself more formalized.

As a general aside, please don't modify the comments of other users even if it seems to clarify things; no one likes having words put in their mouth, so to speak. Shereth 18:09, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Also, I forgot to address the comment re: municipal planning areas. One of the primary problems has already been mentioned, specifically the lack of consistency; there's also the question of authority. But from my perspective it's mostly a question of practicality, as I don't have GIS data for the places that I do know employ planning areas, let alone the rest of the country; they'd have to be added in manually. As far as the visual appeal (or lack thereof) caused by strip annexations and checkerboard boundaries, I've yet to come up with a solution to that so I'm definitely open to suggestions. Shereth 15:08, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

You have 3000 county maps to slightly re-edit handly to place the State miniature map, right ? No one, NO ONE will be crazy enough to do this completely by its own. So we need to break the work in states, provide convenient base map where the user just have to move the miniature. Then, some guys will come and finish the work if that imply 40~80 counties. Yug (talk) 23:05, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

Ok, that's kind of what I thought you were getting at and it makes sense; I just wanted to make sure I understood what you were getting at. Shereth 23:11, 15 October 2012 (UTC)

It sounds like, Shereth, you can already generate all the base maps and, pending any more input on the topic here (anyone? Anyone!?), perhaps you can get started on it. It seems all we're down to now is deciding on how to most efficiently distribute the base maps to whoever is interested in adding the locator maps as well as any other aesthetic clean-up. It would ideally be best to have volunteers to perform raw map clean-up who are familiar with the area in question, so maybe some dings on the relevant local WikiProject Maps pages would be helpful?

The table idea from User:Yug is a good one. I am imagining a single table for each state containing the raw map for each county to start out. Once the locator map is added and other clean up done, individual highlighted cities/towns maps can be generated from this county template file. Obviously we need to agree on some consensus about how much post-production and clean-up needs to be done, so I'd like to address those aforementioned aesthetic points here. Note that as I talk about "clean-up," I am referring to modification using an .svg editor (in my case, Inkscape. There are some issues noted by Shereth whereby saving a file in Inkscape can mess up the data hierarchy necessary to run it through the automated scripts. . We will have to work through these technical issues as best we can, but for now I am assuming the use of Inkscape in base map cleanup for the sake of discussion.):

• Borders and shading of incorporated areas not in the highlighted county: Comparing the most recent sample map of Maricopa County generated by User:Shereth with the last locator map I drew, you will notice the black borders around incorporated areas located partially or completely inside the county borders while the incorporated areas outside the county (note the municipalities to the south and east of Maricopa County) have no such black borders. There is also a slight difference in the shading of the incorporated areas within (color hex code #ddddcf) and without (#d7c9ae). Maybe this is just my own take, but I feel the incorporated areas inside the highlighted county stand out by having this border while the incorporated areas outside will be shown to be less relevant to the given context (which is, after all, a locator map based on individual counties.) I'm open to disagreement or discussion on this matter.
• Appearance of road paths on the maps: Perhaps it's best to concede the differentiation between primary and secondary roads as User:Shereth has pointed out the raw Census data doesn't distinguish between the two. This way, roadways can appear as the thinner of the two paths and mitigate partially the issue of covered-up CDPs. For this, though, we should perhaps grant some leeway for and even encourage people to manually change the roadway paths to reflect the difference between primary and secondary roads.
• County islands and shoestring annexations: I touched on this briefly before, but the primary solution is, again, more tedious editing to meet some arbitrary standard. I'm willing to ignore it for that reason, though it should be up to the user cleaning up the maps to decide whether to remove dozens of little black borders from county islands. I'm guessing it won't even be a problem for the great majority of these maps, anyways.
• Inconsistent or incomplete map data: The maps generated by User:Shereth's script is only as good as the raw data going in, and Census data is not 100% complete. In these cases, I would recommend anyone trying to address a discrepancy refer to any GIS info from a lower-tier government source (Regional government associations, counties, states, et cetera) and correct as necessary.

After a county template file is cleaned up, the volunteer will then need to generate individual locator map files for each city, town, CDP and other locality in the county. User:Shereth, I imagine you might have some brilliant solution for this most tedious of tasks, perhaps something that can be ran through a script again to spit out final, publishable files.

Ixnayonthetimmay (talk) 06:48, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

Good news is, I do already have a solution for generating the individual maps. In fact the base map includes transparent locator circles for the smaller locations, and they're all pretty simple to turn on by changing a setting in the SVG file; I have a script written that can process a finalized county map and create individual maps for all of the locations. So that's not really a concern at this stage.

I do have a little more to say about the points that have been raised but I think at this point it'd be better to move the discussion off to its own page and keep from overloading this one; there's bound to be a lot of sample files that I want to display, particularly while discussing some of the more technical issues, and it could wind up taking a lot of real estate. How about Wikipedia:WikiProject_Maps/US_locations as suggested previously? Shereth 14:42, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

I am all for moving to a separate page. Go on, Shereth and do what you think is best. Anyone else out there have any input on the ideas discussed in this thread so far? Ixnayonthetimmay (talk) 07:07, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Hey everyone, I created a tentative project page at the location given by Shereth, at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Maps/US_locations. It's totally incomplete I'm sure, as I have not created such a page before. Check it out, add to it, edit it and let's move forward with this map project there! Ixnayonthetimmay (talk) 05:17, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Pushpin points moved south

I am not sure where to address this, but today I find all the pushpin points placed on File:Uruguay location map.svg moved to the south. I checked with other location maps, like File:Greece location map.svg and I think I see in all of them a deviation of pushpins. Is this visible to all? Was there some change lately that could have this effect? One example as seen at the time I write this is that the coordinates of kilometre 0 of Montevideo Department dispay in the water, though when I placed them 3 days ago, the pushpin was exactly where it should be. Hoverfish Talk 10:52, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

 Fixed Hoverfish Talk 23:49, 19 September 2012 (UTC)

Gradient maps best practices: copy edit need

Dears, I made a push to gather interesting concepts, resources, and tools to generate gradient maps winthin a 'convention page' (best practice is more correct). The page and text is 90% done, but I'am not an English speaker. May some English native speaker come checkspell and copyedit my writing (there:Wikipedia:WikiProject Maps/Conventions/Gradient maps) before its full inclusion / publication within our list of best practices (Wikipedia:WikiProject Maps/Conventions). This copyedit will be appreciate ! Yug (talk) 14:36, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

Someone to help ? Yug (talk) 20:54, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Did a quick pass over it - it all looks ok now, but I'm not an expert on wiki manual of style. EdwardLane (talk) 10:19, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Discussion at WT:Titles - All about Maps and Article Names

There is this discussion on-going at If Maps Agree? at WT:AT that would benefit from some input from those editors who understand the role of cartographers in naming places. Thanks --Mike Cline (talk) 12:58, 1 October 2012 (UTC)