Registration

We finished main routine with premoderation, but usability must be improved and some upcoming-to-map formulas. Finally, next week we plan to attack registration routine (with Karma, of course).

Stats:
Places before premoderation 1,282,468 (stalled)
Places to moderate 7,716 (saturday, half day, for the first fast look 75% of them are really ok)

p.s. We reading many emails with suggestions. Many good letters.
p.p.s. In great country India people use Wikimapia to mark their homes. I cannot say is it good or not. They just do it. So we have to handle this somehow, we need to find a solution.

Premoderation

It's just a matter of time.

Wikimapia reached 1 million places

A copy of http://www.wikimapia.org/#doc=news.html.
August 16, 2006

We announce the creation of the 1,000,000th place. This place is Upper Room Apostolic Faith Church situated in Kansas, USA. In the same time was placed a Stony Mountain Curling Rink in Canada and Doeblinger Bad Public Sweeming Pool in Austria.



There are many of Earth towns and cities have already been tagged - down to grocery shops. Wikimapia is based on the same principle as Wikipedia, a free-access encyclopedia created by the online community. For well-mapped countries like US and in Europe, Wikimapia is an additional tool, helping locate interesting places. But in asian countries, with almost no mapping, at least digital, this is a very useful tool.


Wikimapia has also come in for criticism, partly for its technology that needs to be smoothened, but more so for the fact that it can be misused with unwanted content. It's a privacy threat and can create problems. But it's not only a problem of Wikimapia itself, Internet is a dangerous thing, like the life.


WikiMapia is a free, multilingual, online wiki map, it allows people to mark physical locations on a map and add description in wiki style.


Current WikiMapia statistics

Most described cities Bombay, India - 55577 Calcutta, India - 52099 Manila, Philippines - 42665 Madras, India - 29690 Ponnani, India - 24384 Bangalore, India - 22206 Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam - 20723 Hanoi, Vietnam - 20387 Mangaluru, India - 19022 Hyderabad, India - 18820 Ahmadabad, India - 16945 Delhi, India - 13254 Thiruvananthapuram, India - 12400 Moscow, Russia - 8792 Mormugao, India - 8724 Bhubaneswar, India - 8659 Dubai, United Arab Emirates - 8643 Dammam, Saudi Arabia - 8296 Visakhapatnam, India - 8163 Indore, India - 6980

Most used languages English - 886213 Vietnamese - 32530 Arabic - 28106 Russian - 27591 Portuguese - 23635 Spanish - 11242 Hindi - 10774 Polish - 7292 Chinese - 6411 German - 4691 Romanian - 4436 French - 3911 Hungarian - 3010 Belorussian - 2786 Italian - 2460 Japanese - 2385 Korean - 2092 Dutch - 1332 Hebrew - 1086 Turkish - 936

Improvements

We made many improvements during last two weeks, mostly in code speed and usability. We still want to check on natural Mac's Safari (our tests are on latest Safari Mac OS Tiger using PearPC PowerPC, seeing some `glucks` with rectangles).

How to add a Google Map to any web page in 30 seconds.

1) Go to WikiMapia.org site and find a part of the map that you need.
2) Click WikiMapia at the top right corner and choose map on your page link.
3) Move and resize frame you see to desired view, adjust view setting if needed and copy given html code to your page or blog.

That's all.

Here is a map placing example of Egypt pyramids:


Some sites already using this technique:
bostonist.com
aimk.blogspot.com

Language distribution on 3 aug 2006

English 728136
Vietnamese 29963
Russian 25361
Portuguese 19892
Arabic 13337
Spanish 10123
Hindi 8237
Polish 6800
Chinese 5648
Romanian 4070
German 3990
French 3180
Hungarian 2522
Japanese 2225
Belorussian 2029
Korean 2019
Italian 1883
Dutch 1223
Hebrew 942
Turkish 811
Bulgarian 739
Armenian 657
Norwegian 551
Croatian 531
Latvian 435
Thai 406
Swedish 242
Persian (Farsi) 197
Finnish 193
Lithuanian 184
Estonian 176
Danish 114
Czech 113
Greek 109
Slovak 79
Slovenian 51
Serbian 20
Swahili 5