[Wikipedia-l] free maps?

Fri Feb 20 10:54:40 UTC 2004

Andre Engels wrote:

>On [[en:Talk:James Cook]] someone asked for a map of his travels. I could
>make such, but I would like to have a map to start from. Are there somewhere
>maps available that can be used for cases like this? Would it be an idea to
>have a map collection somewhere on Wikipedia to work from?
>  
>
If you check [[User:Morwen]]'s contribution history on the en: wiki, 
he's been contributing literally thousands of maps of counties and 
provinces and whatnot.  I believe he mostly traces the outlines from 
maps in books, which isn't a copyright violation since it's just 
reproducing the factual information (a standard map projection of 
geographical data).  Then he does shading and so on in an image-editing 
program.

Ideally we would simply import a lot of GIS data and auto-generate maps 
based on it ("i want a mercatur projection from this latitude/longitude 
to this latitude/longitude, with cities over 1m people labeled), but 
auto-generated maps, at least with freely-available software, 
unfortunately look pretty terrible.  There's a few scattered around on 
Wikipedia, though I can't seem to find one at the moment, and they all 
look like the sort of thing you might have expected a computer-generated 
map to look like circa 1982.

-Mark