Wikipedia:WikiProject Maps

Maps are useful in presenting key facts within a geographical context and enabling a descriptive overview of a complex concept to be accessed easily and quickly. WikiProject Maps encourages the creation of free maps and their upload on Wikimedia Commons. On the project's pages can be found advice, tools, links to resources, and map conventions.

The project suggests some web-friendly map conventions that may help to make maps more readable. The suggested conventions are free for graphists to adapt to their specific needs. Graphists who are unsure of an appropriate style, colour, or style of labelling, may find these suggestions helpful.

Scope
The aim of WikiProject Maps is to improve the quality of maps across the Wikimedia Foundation.
 * The Maps for Wikipedia page is an overview of different formats and tools for maps available on Wikipedia.
 * The Map conventions page provides advice for creating and improving maps.
 * The Map workshop page can be used to add your map requests and your sources. A graphist will create the requested map. The page is forum-based, to enable cross-teaching conversations to take place.
 * The Resources page provides advice to both beginners (in the form of tutorials) and experienced map-makers.

Please feel free to ask questions on our talk page.

Citing sources
As maps can be politically charged, it is important to cite your sources and/or your methodology when editing or creating any map. This is particularly true for historical maps.

For some sources you can use, see WikiProject Maps/Source materials

Exemplars
Map styles is a subject of on-going discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Maps. Please join in the conversation there. For general use, the following is a gallery of maps that have been approved by Wikiproject Maps as exemplars:

File formats to use


The use of JPEG is discouraged, since it is a lossy compression format and so will result in a blurry map or diagram. The quality of GIF images is better than JPEG. GIF images allow for the creation of animations.

PNG is a lossless, truecolor image format. It is good for all maps and particularly for maps with more than 256 colours. As a pixel-based image, it is more difficult than an SVG image to edit. Some uploaders prefer to work with SVG and then upload a PNG version.

SVG is vector graphics format, which has three main advantages:


 * Images can be scaled without data loss, which allows large-sized and very high quality maps to be made;
 * It is a text-based XML language and so can be edited and shared quickly and easily.
 * It is a precisely-coded language which can be converted by script or CSS.

When drawing an SVG map, please name any objects, groups and layers you create, so as to assist anyone who wants to correct the map, look at how the map is set up, or learn how to make an image of their own. SVG image support has been retained as a Wikimedia Meta-wiki for historical interest.

Coordinate-referenced map templates
The process of supplying freely licensed maps for direct use in Wikipedia articles is important to make the articles complete, especially for offline versions. A complementary effort, however, is adding latitude and longitude coordinates to articles about geographically fixed entities. This enables readers to click through to find maps of the surrounding area on external web sites like Google Maps. to be automatically plotted on maps.

To learn how to add geographic coordinates to a page using templates, please see WikiProject Geographical coordinates.

To paste a location map with a dot (using the city of Madrid as an example), copy and paste the following code:

This is the result:

To paste multiple dots on one location map, use Template:Location map many or Template:Location map+. For instruction on creating a map template, see Template:Location map/Creating a new map template.

Using multiple icons
This layout usually works well. It places major fixed-length items in columns on the left and minor variable-length items on the right. Decimal degrees are easier than degrees-minutes-seconds. Two digits are usually enough. Use negative longitude for the western hemisphere.

Relief option on the first line turns relief on and off (sometimes). Error messages are poor, so save early and often.

Additional information can be found at:


 * Template:Location map
 * Template:Location map many
 * Template:Location map+
 * Template:Location map~

Maps can be searched for at Commons:Category:Location maps by country. Icons can be found at Commons:Category:Map icons.

These tricks are sometimes useful:
 * Comment:
 * Label: None: label= or position=none; Big=label_size=200; background=yellow; Split=top bottom; Mouseover: label=[*[Jail|Go To]]
 * Icon: None:mark=clear pog.svg or marksize=0; Big: marksize=16
 * Caption: Linefeed: ; Icon in caption:

Some good icons:

Userboxes
With these userboxes in your user page you can be listed in the relevant category.

User WikiProject Maps

User WP Maps (non-animated)

Members
To see a relevant list, visit Category:Wikipedians interested in maps.

Subpages
A list of all.

Banner
A template for adding articles to Category:WikiProject Maps articles, WikiProject Maps, can be added to talk pages:

Barnstar
—an award placed at another users talk page for improving Map-related articles.