WikiMiniAtlas/ar

Feature VMAP0 layer	Legend
Seaice seaicea	shelf ice
Grassland grassa	grassland
Trees treesa	Trees
Waterbodies inwatera	lakes and wide streams
Ice landicea	landice
Cities builtupa	all settlements
Rivers watrcrsl	river intermittent river
Borders polbndl	country border regional border
Canals aquecanl	canal
Railroad railrdl	railtrack
Roads roadl	with median without median
Mapsymbols
	Article
	Mountain
	Village < 10000 inhabitants
	Town < 100.000 inhabitants
	City < 500.000 inhabitants
	City < 1.000.000 inhabitants
	City > 1.000.000 inhabitants

WikiMiniAtlas is Javascript plugin to display a draggable, zoomable, and clickable worldmap in geocoded Wikipedia articles. The map contains links to all other geocoded articles in Wikipedia and can be magnified down to approximate 100m resolution worldwide. While it looks similar to GoogleMaps it is our own software and free data.

Go to Washington Monument. Check out the -icon in the top right corner. Click it and drag the map around. Use the +/- buttons to zoom in and out, use the downward arrow to open the config page.

Map data courtesy of GSHHS Coastline Data (public domain), VMAP0 rendered using the Mapnik toolkit, additional data courtesy of the US National Park Service, Landsat7 data courtesy of NASA.

Data Sources

• The textual labels on the map are generated from a database by de:User:Kolossos filled with data from de:User:Stefan Kühn combining coordinate data from several different language versions.
• Thumbnails from commons are extracted perioidically from database dumps
• The default base map is generated from VMAP0 rendered using the Mapnik toolkit. The following VMAP0 layers are plotted:

• As a big fan of the NPS I also added all US National Parks and Monuments to the VMAP0 base map. (Thanks for the freely available Geodata!)
• The reduced bandwith map (coastline) is based on GSHHS Coastline Data (public domain)
• The physical shaded relief is created by Tom Patterson of the US National Park Service mainly based on Landsat and SRTM30 data. It is in the public domain, downloadable here. To cut the two hemisphere images up into tiles a custom ImageMagick script was used.
• The Landsat7, daily aqua, and daily terra satellite modes use data by the National Air and Space Administration

Configuration

Put this anywhere in your monobook.js file:

var wma_settings =
{
 height : 400,
 width : 700
}

to set the size of the MiniAtlas window.

Config reference

Parameter	Description
height: h	Set the height of the map popup to h pixels.
width: w	Set the width of the map popup to w pixels.
zoom: z	Set default zoom level of the map to z (0=show whole world, 15=maximum zoom). Setting z to -1 activates automatic choice of a sensible zoom level (default).
enabled: true|false	Set this to false to deactivate the WikiMiniAtlas.
onlyTitle: true|false	Set this to true to limit the WikiMiniAtlas to title coordinates.
buttonFile: url	Replace the blue globe with the image at url.

Technology

• The VMAP0 layer is based on data from the vector map 0 of the US armed forced, rendered using the Mapnik toolkit.
• The coastline layer is based on GSHHS Coastline Data and rendered using custom software built on the AGG (Anti Grain Geometry) graphics library.
• The landsat layer is currently suspended. I'm working on a better way to receive the data with the help from JPL.
• The experimental Moon layer is fetched and cached from http://onmoon.jpl.nasa.gov.

• The text labels on the map are based on data extracted by de:User:Stefan Kühn processed by de:User:Kolossos combining coordinate data from several different language versions. The data is fetched by XMLHTTP-requests from a custom HTTP server program which keeps the data sorted into quadtrees for fast retrieval.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is the red dot not exactly at the position of the article marker?

The coordinates of the article markers are not necessarily the same as the coordinates coded in the actual article you are viewing. This may have different reasons:

• The coordinates have been changed since the last extraction run
• The coordinates in the database were extracted from an article version in a different language. (Articles linked by interwikilinks are assumed to have the same coordinates, however, the geocoding accuracy can vary considerably across projects.)
• Numerical errors in the Javascript interpreter restrict the matching accuracy (they shouldn't in a perfect world...).

I am from xx.wikipedia.org and would like to enable the WikiMiniAtlas on our project!

Great, a bare map without any clickable links should work out of the box, just add code to include MediaWiki:Wikiminiatlas.js in your local MediaWiki:Common.js file. Please do not copy the whole javascript code to your project as you will not get automatic updates, and the interaction protocol between the client javascript and the server may change any time.

If you'd like clickable links in your project language on the map contact me and I'll add server-side support. But your project should have an active geocoding effort going on and must be supported by Wikipedia-World.

Where can I see it in action?

The WikiMiniAtlas is enabled by default on the English, Catalan, Esperanto, French, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian (bokmål), Portugese, Russian and Spanish Wikipedias and Wikimedia Commons.

Screenshots

• 
  The new detailed basemap
• 
  WikiMiniAtlas in action
• 
  Pyramids of Gizeh in satellite mode