Google Maps now integrates with Wikipedia
May 14, 2008 7:57 AM   Subscribe

Google Maps now integrates with Wikipedia (click "More" tab). Concharto is a geographic wiki for documenting historical events. Flick also has a map service.
posted by stbalbach (20 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is really great and awesome. And the little Ws all over everything have great symbolism for Wikipedia's comprehensiveness.

I'm a little concerned about the corporation coopting an open source DB, but then I guess it's no different from, say, RedHat selling a distro of Linux.
posted by DU at 8:05 AM on May 14, 2008


This is going to be so much better than Wikimapia.
posted by grouse at 8:08 AM on May 14, 2008


This was already there as a layer on Google Earth for sometime, right?
posted by vacapinta at 8:19 AM on May 14, 2008


And they also added a real estate search too.
posted by jaimev at 8:31 AM on May 14, 2008


Really? I quite like Wikimapia.
posted by dirtynumbangelboy at 8:35 AM on May 14, 2008


Y'know, despite all the web 2.0 handwaving and talk about how Twitter is going to change our society or whatever, something like this comes along and genuinely surprises and delights me. Awesome.
posted by Happy Dave at 8:38 AM on May 14, 2008


This is great.
posted by cashman at 8:53 AM on May 14, 2008


Another cry of delight here. Thanks for the post; I've bookmarked Concharto and will be visiting it frequently. Great stuff.
posted by languagehat at 8:58 AM on May 14, 2008


Useful, fun, informative, and just plain neat. And I'd never have found it without this post. Thanks.
posted by MrVisible at 9:02 AM on May 14, 2008


Wow, that's neat; the Wikipedia stuff is surprisingly useful. The photos, not so much. Google needs a better cache of geotagged photos.
posted by Nelson at 9:31 AM on May 14, 2008


Sorry to post something silly like this, but I pulled down the "more" tab, and didn't see a reference to Wikipedia. Can someone direct me? Thanks.
posted by Lucy2Times at 10:21 AM on May 14, 2008


Flickr/Yahoo's maps is one thing that they should knock on the head and just subcontract from Google (as they're doing with their advertising). It's a tail-light-chasing clone of Google Maps, only inferior in every way; it leaks browser memory like a sieve and the range and quality of satellite imagery is greatly inferior (especially outside of major metropolitan areas). And, of course, as Google add new layers and content to their map (courtesy of owning Keyhole), Yahoo can only lag further behind. The only possible raison d'etre for it could be bitter rivalry with Google, though if they're allying their advertising concerns, that clearly is not the case.
posted by acb at 10:52 AM on May 14, 2008


Is there some sort of geo-location metadata embedded in wiki pages that allows Google to automatically make the association here?
posted by whir at 11:47 AM on May 14, 2008


Is there some sort of geo-location metadata embedded in wiki pages

Yes. Go to one of the Wikipedia pages from the map and look at the top-right corner it has the Lat/Long cords. Only those WP pages with these cords are displayed on the map, which is actually a smaller sub-set of what could be there. You'll notice certain countries have a lot of "w"'s (Thailand) and others not so many (China). That's because someone found a database for that country with every city/town Lat/long cords and ran a bot to import it into WP.

I'd like to see the "w"'s show different types of articles - like, don't show the city/town articles but do show the interesting monuments and other attractions.
posted by stbalbach at 12:20 PM on May 14, 2008


This highlights the real problem I have with google maps. Points of Intrest (POIs) don't work very well.

If you put too many pois on a map the maps take forever to a load, slow to a crawl, and are almost unusable. So you don't want to put every article on the main map, instead you want to put articles that are close by to the viewport. Makes sense.

However, google maps makes it easy to scroll the map about and see nearby areas. And yet the original pois don't refresh! This is especially obvious when you do a google search for something like, oh say pizza in your favorite city. You get a few results all over the place, and there's no easy way to scroll about to see if there's any pizza places in one particular section of town. I really don't know why google hasn't fixed this already.

Yelp has added on to google maps to sort of do this, however yelp has like 4-5 different map views that all work differently and I'm never sure what makes it decide to display what map implementation. It's crazy has hell.
posted by aspo at 1:34 PM on May 14, 2008


The sorter version being: Google maps makes it really easy to refine my spatial search space, why the hell can't that refine my search results?
posted by aspo at 1:37 PM on May 14, 2008


I would love to be able to click a button somewhere and have my thousands of geotagged Flickr photos turn up on Google Maps / Google Earth. Anyone know if there's an automated way to import them?

Regarding the quality of imagery on Yahoo! maps - often it's worse, but sometimes it's better. The place I'm living now comes up at significantly higher resolution on Yahoo! maps than on Google - although the clunky slowness of Yahoo! does shit me a bit.
posted by Jimbob at 2:04 PM on May 14, 2008


Google has licensed ALL of DigitalGlobe’s Hi-Resolution imagery exclusively for online/web use.
Nobody else can use those high quality images on the web.
posted by m94402 at 2:31 PM on May 14, 2008 [1 favorite]


Nobody else can use those high quality images on the web.

Good thing DigitalGlobe aren't the only ones with high-resolution imagery then, isn't it?
posted by Jimbob at 3:02 PM on May 14, 2008


Flickr's maps are quite useful if you're into seeing countries featuring huge "Please Zoom Out" signs across their barren gray landscapes.
posted by Poagao at 12:39 AM on May 15, 2008


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