The website is maintained and developed by a small team of administrators (the Wikimapia Team), who introduce new features and determine further evolution course. A "watchlist" could be manually set up to monitor all activity or object changes made in one or more of the assigned rectangular areas on the map. Registered users have fewer restrictions on map editing, and are able to edit and/or delete existing places as well as draw " linear features" (roads, railroads, rivers, and ferry lines). Users are likewise capable of uploading several relevant photos. Each object or "tag" has specific information fields which include categories, a textual description, street address, and a related Wikipedia link. Using a simple graphical editing tool, users are able to draw an outline or polygon that matches the satellite image layer underneath. All users, registered or unregistered ( guests), are allowed to add a place on the Wikimapia layer, but guests cannot edit places created by registered users, and have some other limitations. The data in Wikimapia is derived from voluntary crowdsourcing. Wikimapia maps can also be embedded on other websites. The interface is available in many languages, and the textual description of each item may have multiple versions in different languages. For instance, the category "convenience store" appears in multiple places in the hierarchy. This is such as viewing "house" includes viewing "detached house". Objects marked as buildings can have internal places (such as a business inside a larger office building) added.Ĭategories are organized in a hierarchy such that viewing by a more general category includes having the specific category included. Tools for refining existing places according to category as well as measuring distances between objects are also available. Descriptions can be searched by a built-in search tool. Viewers are able to click on any marked object or street segment to see its description. Both kinds of items may have textual descriptions and photos attached to them. Streets are connected by intersection points to form a street grid. The Wikimapia layer is a collection of "objects" with a polygonal outline (like buildings, forests, or lakes) and "linear features" (streets, railroads, rivers, ferry). The navigation interface provides scroll and zoom functionality similar to that of Google Maps. The Wikimapia website provides a Google Maps API-based interactive web map that consists of user-generated information layered on top of Google Maps satellite imagery and other resources. Wikimapia intends to contain detailed information about every place on Earth. It aims to create and maintain a free, complete, multilingual and up-to-date map of the whole world. After two weeks, the page went back and reopened on March 25, 2022.Īccording to the website, Wikimapia is an open-content collaborative mapping project, aimed at marking all geographical objects in the world and providing a useful description of them. However, an older version of Wikimapia was still accessible despite the page being closed. Explanation later." Their Facebook page indicated they were hit by a DNS attack(s?) after a request was made to remove Ukrainian military installation listings, which was not immediately honored. The site is under cyber attack all these days.
As of Maaccess to the site was met with the following message: "Wikimapia is turned off for some time (days or even weeks).
Īfter the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the page was closed on March 2, 2022. A study from 2017 remarked that the site's popularity was in decline. Since 2018, following years of declining popularity, the site has gone nearly inactive with the site's owners having been unable to pay for the usage of Google Maps and the site's social media accounts having remained derelict. Although the project's name is reminiscent of that of Wikipedia, and the creators share parts of the " wiki" philosophy, it is not a part of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation family of wikis.
Wikimapia maps earth google license#
The data, a crowdsourced collection of places marked by registered users and guests, has grown to just under 28,000,000 objects as of November 2017, and is released under the Creative Commons License Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA). Wikimapia was created by Alexandre Koriakine and Evgeniy Saveliev in May 2006. The project implements an interactive "clickable" web map that utilizes Google Maps with a geographically-referenced wiki system, with the aim to mark and describe all geographical objects in the world. Wikimapia is a geographic online encyclopedia project.