Wikipedia:WikiProject Maps

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Maps are an important part of any encyclopedia. Presenting key facts in a geographical context, maps allow a quick description, overview and explanation of complex concepts.

This page encourages the creation of free maps, and their upload on Wikipedia (Commons). Accordingly, on the project's pages you will find advice, tools, links to resources and map conventions.

This project suggests some web-friendly map conventions, which may help to ease map readability, to harmonise Wikipedia's graphic content, and up Wikipedia's global quality. These conventions give suggestions which graphists are free to adapt to their specific needs. However, if you are thinking of creating map graphics and are not sure about the most appropriate style, colour, or labelling to use, you may find these suggestions to be helpful.

Userbox for participants

<nowiki>{{</nowiki>User WikiProject Maps<nowiki>}}</nowiki>

	This user is a member of WikiProject Maps

{{User:Scepia/maps}}}

	This user is interested in maps.

1 Scope
2 Best practices / Conventions
3 File formats to use
4 Tools, templates, and sources
- 4.1 Coordinate-referenced map templates
- 4.2 Clickable geographic image maps
5 Categories
- 5.1 Subpages
6 Assessment
7 See also
- 7.1 Navboxes
- 7.2 Tools

Scope

This WikiProject Maps is set up on several key points:

Our aim... is to enhance the presence of harmonized geographical maps across the Wikipedias.
Our Map conventions()... provide advice for map creation and improvement: conventional colours, text-styles, legend-style.
Our Map workshop()... receive your map requests and your sources, one of us will likely create the requested map. Build as a forum based page, we also make important cross-teaching talks there.
Our Resources and Help pages()... provide advices, both to beginners (such as tutorials) and experienced map makers (such as troubleshooting), map tutorials, and some selected resources.

The page you are reading is a concise summary of all this. Please feel free to ask questions on our talk page.

improving articles related to maps and cartography.

Best practices / Conventions

Main article: /Conventions

Map conventions & Map Project

	Conventions set:	Location maps^(e.n.) Gradient maps Topographic maps Exchanges maps Orthographic maps

	Drafts:	Areas maps^(e.n.) (Locator maps background + Historical maps) US locations SVG_locator_maps_(2012)

	Others:	Map Workshop (practice cartography here) Map Project & Discussions /Conventions (general) (suggestions & discussions) Map tutorials^(e.n.) Software (Inkscape) Gis datas & palette files (↔en) Map and color blindness [e.n. = expansion need]

Cite Your Sources

Maps are often highly particularly politically charged. Therefore, perhaps more so than most other content it is very important to cite sources and/or methodology used in the creation of a map. This is particularly true for historical maps.

Map colours

Topographic maps

Historical maps

Gallery of examples

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:

Gallery of Exemplars
Topographic map in SVG format. Featured picture.
Outline of UK
India locator map (blank), used as a base map for other India maps. It is a featured picture and an example of a SVG format map.
Texas Locator Map with US inset. (orange not up to date)
Florida Political Map
Ancient Greek Colonies of North Black Sea
Example of inset
An historic map example featuring the Holy Roman Empire. (orange not up to date)

File formats to use

Demonstration of how to create a map using layers: 1.Valley ; 2.Plain ; 3.Hills ; 4.Rivers ; 5.Troops ; 6.Moves ; 7.Text ; 8.Thumbnail map ; 9.Legend.

JPEG and GIF (discouraged)

JPEG is discouraged, since it is a lossy compression format, it will result in a blurry map or diagram. GIF is not as bad, but not as good as PNG. GIF maps allow for animations. (See below.)

PNG

PNG is a lossless, truecolor image format. It is good for all maps, but especially for maps with more than 256 colours. As a pixel based image, it is hard to edit and correct, compared to an SVG. Some uploaders prefer to work with SVG, and upload a PNG version which avoids errors common with the display of SVG format on Wikipedia.

SVG (encouraged)

SVG is vector graphics format, which has 3 big advantages:

First, it can be scaled without data loss, which allows the use and display of our SVG maps in large (unlimited) sizes while keeping perfect quality
Second, SVG is a text based XML language, which means:
- It can be edited quickly and easily. This makes sharing, correcting, and improving easier.
- It is a precisely coded language, which can be converted by script or CSS.

Note: When you draw an SVG map, please also consider naming the objects, groups and layers you create. That will assist anyone who wants to correct the map or look at how the map is set up to learn how to make their own.

More info about SVG: SVG; meta:SVG image support; wiki.svg.org

Tools, templates, and sources

Main page: Wikipedia:Graphic Lab/Map workshop

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 Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates.

To paste a location map with a dot, paste the following:

   {{Location map|Spain|label=Madrid|mark=Green_pog.svg|lat=40.5|long=-3.7|width=230|float=center}}

To paste multiple dots on one location map, use these templates: Template:Location map many or Template:Location map+

For instruction on creating a map template, see Template:Location map/Creating a new map template.

Clickable geographic image maps

See:

Category:Wikipedia geographic image maps

Assessment

Banner

{{WikiProject Maps}} can be added to talk pages. It gives this:

This template adds articles to Category:WikiProject Maps articles.

Assessment

See the Assessments Department - Instructions and FAQ

Wikipedia:WikiProject Maps

Contents