Comments on: Google Maps now integrates with Wikipedia

Google Maps now integrates with Wikipedia

stbalbach — Wed, 14 May 2008 07:57:29 -0800

Google Maps now integrates with Wikipedia (click "More" tab). Concharto is a geographic wiki for documenting historical events. Flick also has a map service.

By: DU

DU — Wed, 14 May 2008 08:05:11 -0800

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.

By: grouse

grouse — Wed, 14 May 2008 08:08:19 -0800

This is going to be so much better than Wikimapia.

By: vacapinta

vacapinta — Wed, 14 May 2008 08:19:24 -0800

This was already there as a layer on Google Earth for sometime, right?

By: jaimev

jaimev — Wed, 14 May 2008 08:31:50 -0800

And they also added a real estate search too.

By: dirtynumbangelboy

dirtynumbangelboy — Wed, 14 May 2008 08:35:28 -0800

Really? I quite like Wikimapia.

By: Happy Dave

Happy Dave — Wed, 14 May 2008 08:38:28 -0800

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.

By: cashman

cashman — Wed, 14 May 2008 08:53:28 -0800

This is great.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Wed, 14 May 2008 08:58:40 -0800

Another cry of delight here. Thanks for the post; I've bookmarked Concharto and will be visiting it frequently. Great stuff.

By: MrVisible

MrVisible — Wed, 14 May 2008 09:02:35 -0800

Useful, fun, informative, and just plain neat. And I'd never have found it without this post. Thanks.

By: Nelson

Nelson — Wed, 14 May 2008 09:31:15 -0800

Wow, that's neat; the Wikipedia stuff is surprisingly useful. The photos, not so much. Google needs a better cache of geotagged photos.

By: Lucy2Times

Lucy2Times — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:21:19 -0800

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.

By: acb

acb — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:52:10 -0800

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.

By: neustile

neustile — Wed, 14 May 2008 11:40:58 -0800

Lucy2Times: it's not really a tab -- it's a button on the top right of the map.

By: whir

whir — Wed, 14 May 2008 11:47:43 -0800

Is there some sort of geo-location metadata embedded in wiki pages that allows Google to automatically make the association here?

By: neustile

neustile — Wed, 14 May 2008 12:15:41 -0800

whir: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geographical_coordinates

By: stbalbach

stbalbach — Wed, 14 May 2008 12:20:45 -0800

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.

By: aspo

aspo — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:34:39 -0800

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.

By: aspo

aspo — Wed, 14 May 2008 13:37:00 -0800

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?

By: Jimbob

Jimbob — Wed, 14 May 2008 14:04:30 -0800

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.

By: m94402

m94402 — Wed, 14 May 2008 14:31:11 -0800

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.

By: Jimbob

Jimbob — Wed, 14 May 2008 15:02:07 -0800

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?

By: Poagao

Poagao — Thu, 15 May 2008 00:39:19 -0800

Flickr's maps are quite useful if you're into seeing countries featuring huge "Please Zoom Out" signs across their barren gray landscapes.