21.10.2011
The recent launch of the Cityguides had drawn our attention to the number of street duplicates on Wikimapia. We have taken some measures aimed at eliminating those duplicates.
1) The street name input in the address field when creating and editing places was changed.
Based on collected statistics we found that most of the duplicated streets are being created when adding or editing place addresses. Accordingly we have changed the input widget to be the same as the one used in street creation. It has proven itself very effective helping to avoid duplicates while naming segments.
2) Relevant watchlist bug fixed
Until now the streets created through the address form on place edit pages did not appear on the watchlists. Now all the streets added using the place edit form are shown correctly on the watchlists, thus making detection of duplicates an easier task.
3) Street duplicates merged automatically
We have programmatically merged some nearest street duplicates. Altogether more than 40 000 duplicates were eliminated. Streets with additional photos or descriptions in more than one language were left intact to avoid data loss, so some of the duplicates still need to be merged manually.
11.10.2011
Hello, Wikimapians!
We are introducing e-mail verification for new users, to help in the struggle against spammers and vandals.
Now every new user will have to verify his e-mail address after registration. Until the user completes this step his access level will be reduced to the same as a Guest's, so registration with a fake e-mail address gives spammers no advantage and no access to fully fledged users' features. It is also impossible to use the same e-mail address for more than one user account. For all email duplicates (of course we found some) we left last one (those, which have the newest 'lastseen' time) as is, and the others were renamed with suffix '__dupl%' (% - number of founded duplicate). All renamed mails are not verified.
All other currently registered users' e-mail addresses are considered as verified. But please note - if you change your e-mail address in your profile settings, you will have to verify it.
16.10.2007
Not very recent information (we are quite busy with development): we opened a forum to be closer to our contributors and to enable them to communicate with each other about Wikimapia subjects. Our forum is here: http://wikimapia.org/forum/
Also there are many minor updates in many aspects, plus after many requests we are going to turn on mouse wheel support. More serious updates are coming, but first we want to let our advanced users to test them before releases. That is why we can not give you detailed information at the moment
16.08.2007
Currently we are working on a new version of Wikimapia, beta of which we are planning to reveal in September.
What will be in a new version:
fully editable map, ability of adding/updating such map objects as buildings, regions, roads - everything we usually see on a map and even more with descriptions and other useful information;
all information will be categorized;
user trust system with object verification system.
We hope that with this changes we will have time to finish export routine coding, therefore our users could be able to download data created in Wikimapia to their portable devices or favorite software.
Also we are planning to publish: Terms of Service, Copyright Notice and Privacy Notice.
10.06.2007
31st of May we visited Google Developers Day in Moscow where Google presented their new addition to Google Maps - Mapplets (a kind of gadget for maps).
After a while we made Wikimapia mapplet which in fact is a layer of Wikimapia on Google Maps. Currently Google Mapplets function is in preview mode, for techgeeks interesting in it there's a special link.
So, to see a Wikimapia layer on Google Maps you have to add Wikimapia layer to your Google mapplets using this link, and then this layer will be visible at Google Maps 2 preview.
08.04.2007
We finished the translation system, and now we are able to translate Wikimapia interface to all languages we want. We have 60 languages and only Russian and English translated.
If you want to help us to translate (using easy web interface) from English into languages below, please contact us at wikimapia@gmail.com and send your Wikimapia username and real name (to be remembered in Wikimapia history). Also you may check at our wiki if languages are taken for translation.
languages to translate:
Afrikaans
Albanian
Arabic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Belarussian
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Catalan
Chinese
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
Estonian
Finnish
French
Galician
German
Greek
Gujarati
Hebrew
Hindi
Hungarian
Icelandic
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Kannada
Korean
Latvian
Lithuanian
Macedonian
Malay
Malayalam
Marathi
Nepali
Norwegian
Oriya
Persian (Farsi)
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi
Romanian
Serbian
Slovak
Slovenian
Spanish
Sundanese
Swahili
Swedish
Tagalog
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Vietnamese
22.03.2007
Polygons
We are taking the firsts steps with vector data in Wikimapia. From now it is possible to add polygon info for places (only for registered users at this moment).
Currently we cannot show many polygons (browsers are too slow with them), later we will find a better way to present polygons. For now we are just highlighting polygon when you mouseover the place.
If you have any ideas, suggestions for improvement, bug reports or comments email us at wikimapia@gmail.com, or discuss it at Wikimapia forum.
GeoTools
We have added new features that allow to measure distances and areas. We hope you would find them useful. Look for them in the main Wikimapia menu.
