[Wikipedia-l] Open Mapping

Fri Oct 8 20:49:40 UTC 2004

Stirling Newberry wrote:

> Using Grass and a postgres SQL database, it would be possible to 
> create an open mapping repository. Since a large fraction of all wiki 
> entries are locations, this would allow maps to be made for most of 
> them, perhaps even by a bot process eventually.
>
> Is there any such project in process? Is there any interest if there 
> isn't such a project?

The last time I looked at it, the maps Grass produced looked _really_ 
bad, along the lines of the quality of maps I could view on my Apple ][ 
in the mid-1980s.  Simple color schemes, no shading, lots of aliasing, 
etc.  There are a few such auto-generated maps in Wikipedia, and they 
generally look pretty bad too---much worse than the maps we have from 
other sources, including some Wikipedian-created maps.

Has this gotten any better?  Ideally I'd love such a solution, but it'd 
have to produce results that looked reasonably good.

-Mark