Meet the New Wikimapia

Meet the New Wikimapia

Every project needs an update from time to time. Wikimapia started up in 2006. During all these years we’ve been maintaining and developing the project. But some time ago we decided that the moment for a big revision has come, so we’ve started to create a new engine for Wikimapia.

Marking the upcoming Wikimapia 6th Anniversary, our team is happy to introduce you the result of our efforts - the New Wikimapia. The New Wikimapia is an independent and structured engine that contains every Wikimapia’s tool rewritten from scratch. In short, the new engine is a whole lot faster, cleaner and easier to maintain. We understand that testing and getting familiar with the new engine might take some time, so we decided to launch the New Wikimapia in parallel mode. This means that you have an opportunity to try it for several months before we will substitute the new version for the old one permanently. We suggest you to check out the new engine and let us know about positive changes or drawbacks that you may find. New Wikimapia is still a beta version, so it can or even might have some glitches and bugs. Please keep reporting us abouts bugs, so we could fix them and totally assume to the New Wikimapia.

You can already notice some improvements and new functions appeared:

• More map or satellite imagery providers (bing, yandex, ovi, yahoo and OSM) are now available. This, for example, can be helpful when exploring a place which picture quality differs for various providers.
• The river editor has been revised.
• The algorithm of drawing polygons also has been amended. It easier to draw correctly a complicated polygon.
• New road types are added: pedestrian and bicycle paths, railroad types.
• The New Wikimapia is designed to change languages without reloading the page. It means less waiting, as all the titles and buttons will change simultaneously.
• Finally, the whole appearance of the New Wikimapia already slightly differs from the old version. Eventually we will change the look of all the interface for your convenience.

We believe that the new engine will be a real time saver, so you’ll enjoy Wikimapia even more.

http://new.wikimapia.org