Meet the renewed Wikimapia blog

After the release of a new version it was necessary for us to bring our users the maximum enjoyment from using of updated Wikimapia. We believe that we managed to do this. And now we are ready to provide you the latest information on the development of Wikimapia, useful advice and guidance, our videos and presentations, and much more interesting in our renewed blog, which got a new web address.

Moreover, in our blog you will be able to find out a lot about project participants and Wikimapia users in different countries. Also here we will pass our opinions on issues of interest to us. Soon you will have the opportunity to share this information with friends, importing these posts to your blogs at the popular online hangouts, including facebook, twitter, etc.

Hope to see you again soon at http://blog.wikimapia.org

Forum and other stuff

Not a very new information (we are quite busy with development): we opened a forum to be closer to our collaborators, to let them guide us and talk to each other about Wikimapia subjects. Link is here: http://wikimapia.org/forum/

Also there are many minor updates in many aspects, plus after many requests we will turn on mouse wheel support. Bigger updates are coming, before we have to talk with our advanced users and let them test it before releases - I will not give detailed info at this moment.

Wikimapia in August

Currently we are working on new version of Wikimapia, beta of which we are planning to reveal in September. What will be in new version:
-fully editable map, possibility of adding/updating map objects like buildings, regions, roads, e.g. everything we usually see on the map and even more with description and other useful information
-all information will be categorized
-user trust system with object verification system

We hope that with this changes we will have a time to finish export routine coding, that any user could be able to download data they've created in Wikimapia to their portable devices or favorite software.

Also we are planning to publish: Terms of Service, Copyright Notice and Privacy Notice.

Wikimapia at Google Mapplets

31st of May we visited Google Developers Day in Moscow where Google presented their new future addition to Google Maps - Mapplets (a kind of gadget for maps).

After a while we made Wikimapia mapplet which in fact is a layer of Wikimapia on Google Maps. Currently Google Mapplets function is in preview mode, for techgeeks interesting in it there's a special link.

So, to see a Wikimapia layer on Google Maps you've to add Wikimapia layer to your Google mapplets using this link, and then this layer will be visible at Google Maps 2 preview.

Wikimapia turns one year old

We opened Wikimapia one year ago, on May 24, 2006. It was an amazing idea and since that time Wikimapia takes the biggest part in our life.

What has been done during this year? Wikimapia collected nearly 4 million places (+3700k plus +200k moved to trash, and +100k precise polygons created), +60k users registered in Wikimapia in 6 last months, +500k messages left by visitors.

Wikimapia also entered into 1000 most visited sites in Alexa statistics, it took nearly one year to do this.

We would like to thank our contributors for their knowledge, our visitors for their interest, Wikipedia for it's inspiration and Google Maps for supporting new technologies in whole world.

What will be in future? Road mark-up (in real Wikimapia way), address and routing systems, further evolution in search, more useful map layers, places filtering system, new user administrative functions, and other neat upgrades.

We develop internet together, the future comes soon enough!

Localization, translation of user interface.

We finished translation system, and now we are able to translate Wikimapia interface to all languages we want. We have 60 languages and only Russian and English translated.

If you want to help us to translate (using easy web interface) from English into languages below, please contact us at wikimapia@gmail.com and send your Wikimapia username and real name (to be remembered in Wikimapia history). Also you may check at Wikipedia if languages are taken for translation.

To translate:
Afrikaans
Albanian
Arabic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Belarussian
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Catalan
Chinese
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Estonian
Finnish
French
Galician
German
Greek
Gujarati
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Kannada
Korean
Latvian
Lithuanian
Macedonian
Malay
Malayalam
Marathi
Nepali
Norwegian
Oriya
Persian (Farsi)
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi
Romanian
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Sundanese
Swahili
Swedish
Tagalog
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Vietnamese

Polygons and Geotools.

Polygons

We are making firsts steps with vector data in Wikimapia. From now it is possible to add polygon info for places (only for registered users at this moment).

We cannot show many polygons now (browsers are too slow with them), later we will find a better way to present polygons. For now we just highlight polygon for mouseovered place.

Example: Moscow Kremlin

For improvements, ideas, bugs and comments write us to wikimapia@gmail.com, or duscuss it at Wikipedia.

GeoTools

We added measuring of distance and area, we hope you would find them useful. Look in main Wikimapia menu.