File talk:Open street map central london.svg

map update and style update
This is looking a bit old now, both in terms of OpenStreetMap data, and the map rendering style. I can see the data is a year or two old. OpenStreetMap now has much more building coverage in central London (thanks to the OSMLondon mapping parties!)

Also this is the "standard" style of OpenStreetMap rendering as it was a few years ago. It has undergone some small tweaks which make the colours a bit less garish. However the standard style is still quite a jumble of different colours. A more stripped-down style would work better.

Actually though the key thing to do to achieve more pleasing / useful results on articles (such as Westminster Abbey) where this image is being scaled down to a small thumbnail size, would be to use a lower zoom level.

This kind of digital cartography has a "native" zoom level, so I suppose in theory you would avoid scaling down the image at all. In practice visitors to the Westminster Abbey article probably understand that it's a dinky thumbnail of a larger image, and they're not going to be squinting at the thumbnail trying to read road names, but the display of minor roads is hopeless in the current thumbnail for example, and at this scale they would normally be dropped.

-- Harry Wood (talk) 16:19, 17 September 2014 (UTC)


 * 5 years later. These days I see Westminster Abbey is using a new map image (new style from the new wikimedia map server) but then some articles like National Gallery are still using this old one. -- Harry Wood (talk) 14:42, 24 May 2021 (UTC)


 * The filename of this looks wrong to me too because OpenStreetMap should be written without spaces (Many people get that wrong of course). So I think we want to reference a better image at a better title. Looks like the place within the template set-up that would need editing is: Module:Location_map/data/United Kingdom Central London. Now I just need to get around to making a better image -- Harry Wood (talk) 14:37, 22 April 2022 (UTC)