Wikimapia's new face released!

Good things come in small packages they say, and it is absolutely true for the news today.
We think that it is an appropriate time for making changes to the external look of the site has come. And theese huge news is dedicated to the results of our Wikimapia design changing. A global New Wikimapia interface revision and transformation has been made!

Interface update applies to all tools and features: from inside Wikimapia windows to buttons and fonts appearance.

New place pages:

Better tools navigation and layout:



Beautiful profile page and messages:


There are a lot of other upgrades also. All in all theese severally minor changes affect strongly the whole impression of Wikimapia and make the project more convenient. We hope you’ll like the new improvements and we would be glad to here your opinion. Wikimapia Team believes that this interface upgrade is a huge step towards being modern & easy-to-use.

20 000 000 places tagged

Connect your Wikimapia account with Facebook!

By contributing to Wikimapia, you are already involved in a huge international project whose goal is to gather and share useful information about the world, around the world. Wikimapia recognizes its users like to communicate and socialize globally so what better way than to connect through an international social media giant like Facebook.

Connecting your WM account with a Facebook page makes the idea of describing the whole world spread much more easily. It is also a great platform to let your friends know about the contributions you have added as well as learning interesting trivia about almost every place in the world. The best thing is that the information is provided by people like you, so why not save time by describing the world with your friends in the best way possible.

It only takes a few seconds to connect your account with FB, and after that only one click will be needed to sign in. Registering with Facebook is easy, so there's no need to re-enter your information or remember extra usernames and passwords.

Signing in with Facebook allows you to share your discoveries with your friends. By simply using this feature you shall attract attention to your contributions and help Wikimapia to spread its data for public domain.

Launching this new feature is a beginning of our support to integrate Wikimapia with social networks. Stay tuned to see more new features coming soon!

Collaboration improvement

Wikimapia encourages people to act collaboratively. We believe that you, as individuals, are great in mapping and you can be even greater when tagging or editing in groups. That’s why there is a feature of creating collaborations on WM. We are happy that a lot of users find it useful though we’ve been thinking that the tool needs some improvement.

What’s new:

1. Сreate a collaboration without WM administration approval. We decided to free you from this necessity and save your time. Though we still hope that AUs will watch the collaboration tool from time to time and moderate spam or rubbish groups.
2. You do not need an approval from the collaboration creator to take part in it.
3. Invite users to your collaboration! To prevent spam invitations there is a limit on amount of invitations available. To start with you can invite 20 users. When your collaboration reaches more than 20 participants, wich automatically means that it is usefull and of inteterest, invite more 980 users.
4. Add a country category to your new collaboration, so that other users can sort it out easily.
5. There is no limit on the number of participants anymore.

Don’t you think that it looks nicer?

PS Note that the Docs Collaborations page has been improved as well.

7 best Halloween sights of all times.

The Halloween is comming! Already decided how to celebrate the All Hallows' Eve? Wikimapia prepared a list of most inspiring classic creepy Halloween sightes of all times. We bet even the bravest man would get goosebumps spending the Halloween night here!

Frankenstein Castle is a hilltop castle in Germany. In the middle of 13th century Reiz von Breuberg erected Frankenstein Castle and named himself von und zu Frankenstein. In 1673, the legendary alchemist Johann Conrad Dippel was born at the castle. There have been claims of Dippel influencing Mary Shelley to write her Frankenstein novel. It is known that in 1814, prior to writing the famous novel, Mary took a journey on the river Rhine. She spent a few hours in the town of Gernsheim, which is located about ten miles away from the castle. In 1976, American soldiers stationed in Darmstadt founded an annual Halloween festival at the castle, which has grown to become one of the biggest Halloween festivals in Europe.



According to the legends, the Lysa Hora hill, which is located in Kiev, Ukraine, is the largest and most famous location of the mystical "Bald Mountain" - a traditional site of the witch gatherings. Particularly, it is asserted in the writings of Nikolay Gogol.



Sleepy Hollow is a village in the town of Mount Pleasant in Westchester County, New York, United States. Originally known as North Tarrytown, it was given its current name in 1996 when residents voted to have it changed to honor the Washington Irving story "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", who is buried on Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.



Bran Castle is a national monument and landmark in Romania. The fortress is situated on the border between Transylvania and Wallachia. Commonly known as "Dracula's Castle", it is marketed as the home of the titular character in Bram Stoker's Dracula. The castle is now a museum opened for tourists, displaying art and furniture collected by Queen Marie.



The Brocken mountain is the highest peak of the Harz mountain range and also the highest peak of Northern Germany. The Brocken has always played a role in legends and has been connected with witches and devils. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe took up the legends in his play Faust.



The Winchester Mystery House was built by Sara Winchester because of a supposed threat by the victims of her husbands rifles. Every man and woman shot down by the Winchester rifle is believed to reside in the home, and the home's countless doorways and windows that lead to nowhere are to misguide the spirits that chased Sara in life.



Salem town, USA is knowm as the location for notorious 1692 Witch Trials, where twenty-six people accused of witchcraft were tried, convicted and put to death. The most popular town site is the 17th century Witch House, which still stands on the corner of North and Essex streets.

Are there some creepy Halloween places in your hometown? Tag them on Wikimapia and tell the whole world!

Wikimapia September news

First Autumn month was cool and sunny. A perfect period for new developments. This time we have really big news for you!

P.S. painting: Albrecht Durer, Stag Beetle

Mobile version of Wikimapia

Today we are happy to introduce you the result of our recent efforts - mobile version of Wikimapia! To use Wikimapia on your mobile phone go to wikimapia.org and the mobile version of the site will open automatically.

Mobile version is read-only yet, which means you can browse through Wikimapia data from the map, use search and see places around you. Another useful feature is geolocation, that helps to orientate yourself and shows all places around your location.

Launching the mobile version of WM is marking the beginning of our way towards the support of mobile devices and the moment when it will be possible to add and edit places in real time, looking right at them.
We hope it will help our users to be in touch with our project every day and keep Wikimapia content more up-to-date. Stay tuned for the news in this area.