Interactive roads

Today we are pleased to introduce a long-awaited feature - road interactivity.
As you can see, not only places can be added and described on Wikimapia, there are also roads. From the beginning it was difficult to browse for road pages as a user couldn’t open them directly from the default site mode. With the new feature the access to the road pages expanded, so you can hover mouse over any road and see it highlighted and the tooltip with its name appears. Then, if you click on the road you’ll see it’s description, which any registered user can edit.

This new feature is aimed to make data search easier and increase the amount of valuable information that might help you to orientate yourself on the map better.
Road interactivity is currently working on the New Wikimapia (http://new.wikimapia.org/) starting from the 12th zoom level. So you can already get familiar with the new feature and don’t forget to leave your suggestions for improving Wikimapia on forum and report us about bugs on bugtracker.

Wikimapia blog

During these years our users have been adding and gathering different information from around the world, and we value every little peace of it a lot. It is you who make Wikimapia information unique and interesting. Today we are starting to keep Wikimapia blog aimed to encourage our contributors and share most amusing places and latest news on Wikimapia with you.

Those, who've been with us for a long time may remember that we had already tried to keep a blog, but probably that just wasn't the right time. It happened so that the old blog became a bit separate from Wikimapia community and we moved the news and topics on forum. Today we decided to bring back the idea of Wikimapia blog. We believe you’ll enjoy the new version of it or even learn something new.

http://blog.wikimapia.org/

Venues and Infrastructure of 2012 Summer Olympics of London

On 27 July 2012 Summer Olympics will begin with a magnificent opening ceremony in London. Wikimapia users are fond of Olympics and already have tagged all Olympic venues in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London. On basis of these information we prepared a guide of the forthcoming event for you.

View on Olympic Park

To get an idea of 2012 Olympics geography you need to find London on the map and switсh on ‘olympic venue’ category. You’ll see a group of buildings to the north-east of the city center - the Olympic Park that covers parts of Stratford, Bow, Leyton and Homerton in East London.
To start the journey through Olympic Park you should come to Stratford International Railway Station. Exit the station and you’ll get right to Westfield Stratford City - the gateway to the Olympic Park, with 70% of visitors to the games projected to pass through it. That’s a nice place for shopping, buying some souvenirs or having dinner. The shopping centre includes 300 stores, 70 restaurants, a Vue Cinema, a bowling alley, and a casino.


Olympic stadium & Aquatics Centre


Orbit Tower

Aquatics Center is the venue for swimming, diving, and synchronised swimming events of the Summer Olympics. Designed by Zaha Hadid, the Aquatics Centre has a distinctive design incorporating a curved roof. It contain two 50-metre swimming pools and a 25 metre diving pool and have a capacity of 17,500.
On the other hand of the Railway Station is the 2012 Olympic Village, which seems a pleasant place for living. 2800 homes are built here for the olympics, and another 1500 being added on after the games. The buildings will be mixed used, with shops and cafes on the bottom floors and 2-4 bedroom houses.
Right behind the village there is the Basketball Arena, that will host the basketball preliminaries and handball semi-finals and final, and the London Velodrome with BMX Circuit.

Eton Manor is the northernnmost area of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. It will house temporary training pools for participants in aquatics events, including three 50m pools for swimmers, and smaller pools for synchronised swimmers and water polo competitors.
The Handball Arena for the handball preliminaries and quarter finals and modern pentathlon fencing and shooting events of the 2012 Summer Olympics is located between the stadium and Summer Olympics Media Center. Nearby is Olympic Hockey Center.


Millennium Dome


Wembley Stadium

If you planning to take a break between Olympic events and see some London city sights, you may filter all objects by 'interesting places' category and undoubtedly find something to satisfy your taste.
Watch and enjoy the Olympic games with Wikimapia!
http://wikimapia.org/#lat=51.5444723&lo ... =b&tag=266

We started to invite new Categories Moderators

We are glad to inform you, that Categories documentation is completed (you may read it here http://wikimapia.org/docs/User_interface#Categories and here http://wikimapia.org/docs/Community#Cat ... moderators).

Today, after Advanced Users and current Categories Moderators have considered and discussed all the candidates, we are starting to invite foremost approved Categories Moderators one by one from the list of those users who had already applied for the status in comments of previous topic (viewtopic.php?f=74&t=9607). If you haven’t applied for Categories Moderator status earlier but think you could contribute to Wikimapia having the status, you can still leave a request here in comments.

Please, stay patient, as inviting every user to Categories Moderator group might take some time.
Thanks everyone for being enthusiastic, we hope that new Categories Moderators will facilitate the proper work of category filter.

Advanced User proposal and promotion

Dear Wikimapians!

We are happy to present you a new procedure of Advanced User proposal and promotion. We hope that the new system will clear a lot of misunderstanding and vagueness in Advanced User promotion issue.

From now on anyone with 5+ user level can make a request for Advanced User Status (it will be offered automatically) and his/her candidacy will be put to vote. If current Advanced Users decide that a person has approved him/herself as a competent editor and can help Wikimapia by taking additional responsibilities and powers he/she will be invited in Advanced Users group.

Thereby an Advanced User status becomes something that anyone experienced enough can request for, though the voting will proceed on the ground of all user contributions to Wikimapia, in other words not only experience points will be counted, but also your social status, your behavior and communication with other members of Wikimapia community, etc.

We’ve also invented a method of demotion voting on the ground of complaining reports, so that any regular user could influence Advanced User's work. This means that you can leave an anonymous complaining report with your comment and a prooflink about an Advanced User in his profile. But please remember: before leaving a complaint you need to contact the exact Advanced User first and express your displeasure in an open conversation. You can apply a complaint only in case an Advanced User did not solve the issue. Complaining criteria:

• Low quality of contribution
• Aggressive behavior/Harassment
• Failure to resolve a conflict in a civilized way
• Unrighteous ban

If an Advanced User gets more than 10 complains in a month his candidacy will be put to vote, so other Advanced Users could consider all the complains and make a decision.
Depending on voting results an Advanced User will either get a warning and continue his work or will be released from Advanced User duties. In case of draw voting his/her candidacy will stay in Demotion list until a new voting will determine his/her further status.

Everyone who currently has the status should sign the codex to retain it. There will be no promotion voting for them and their status will be confirmed immediately.

We hope that new procedure of Advanced User status receiving will be more fair and transparent, so that only worthy users will become and stay Advanced Users.

Please note that releasing the new Advanced User promotion system will cause a queue of candidates. For this reason we ask you to be patient. As it was said everyone who has 5th user level will get an opportunity to make a request for Advanced User status, but first of all to be fair we will give this chance to those, who has 7th and 6th levels. Thereby, users who just received the 5th user level will be at the end of the queue and need to wait couple of weeks. They will get the invitation as soon as the requests will be processed.

Wikimapia official Documentation release

We are happy to inform you that Wikimapia official Documentation is completed. Thanks to Advanced Users and Documentors we’ve reorganized and updated all previous materials and user guide written by Wikimapia Community and added a lot of new articles and sections.

We believe that Wikimapia Documentation will clear a lot of misunderstandings and debates. As all the guidelines and recommendations acquire an official status and significance now, you are able to refer to Documentation when helping new users, exchanging of messages or solving other issues.

We eхpected that some of you may ask about wikimapia.org/wiki. Don’t worry: we are not going to delete it. Wiki will stay like an unofficial storage source, that users can use for any purposes (upload images, make their pages, writing drafts for further projects or documents, etc).

Wikimapia Docs certainly needs to be translated. We are going to start a large-scale translation collaboration later, when everybody will familiarize with the Documentation. As we concede that Docs still may need a light correcting (there were a lot of information to check, so even the most accurate documentors could have missed some mistakes), we encourage you to leave comments at this topic, if you'll find anything obscure or incorrect.

You can find Wikimapia Docs by this link http://wikimapia.org/docs or at the top menu.

Happy Birthday Wikimapia!

Wikimapia was launched in 24th May in 2006. For all these years the project has grown and developed a lot as amount of its users as well. Today Wikimapia is 6 years old! For this occasion we’ve been working so much lately and prepared for you a real birthday surprise. Wikimapia Team is so happy to present you some innovations.

First of all, we changed Wikimapia licence type. We encourage and support any digital creativity and sharing. Therefore to make Wikimapia content more accessible for distribution we decided to change Wikimapia license type to the most popular among Wikis “Creative Commons license Attribution-ShareAlike” (CC BY-SA). This means that from now on Wikimapia offers all of its data for sharing, recasting, transforming or adapting in any form recognizably derived from the original for any use. We think that all content should be free for using and beget new free content. So we encourage you to build your work upon Wikimapia data and require its further distribution under the same or similar license to this one, as it’s written in Wikimapia Terms of Service (http://wikimapia.org/terms_reference.html).


And the last but not least is the New Wikimapia - the new engine, as you may already heard. It is working as beta-version in parallel mode, so we invite you to contribute to its testing and discussing.

Wikimapia is looking forward to become faster, more open-content and collaborative!