On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 11:45 PM, Lars Aronsson <l...@aronsson.se> wrote: > Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason wrote: > >> Just installing an extension on Wikimedia and pulling tiles from >> OSM would not be acceptable: >> >> * Wikimedia would need its own updated Planet dump >> * Its own tile rendering infrastructure > > At first I thought that these requirements were natural, but are > they really? If someone already renders tiles, why should someone > else need to render the same tile again? Wouldn't it be easier to > copy the generated tiles than to render them again? And since the > tiles are static PNGs, shouldn't a squid web proxy be sufficient > to handle the bandwidth? > > Wikipedia's servers are in Florida. For readers in Europe, there > is a squid proxy in Amsterdam. Make a "dig en.wikipedia.org" and > see if your DNS points to rr.esams.wikimedia.org where "AMS" is > for Amsterdam. > > It's another issue if Wikipedia wants a different rendering, > perhaps tiles without names, in order to place Wikipedia links as > an overlay.
Firstly, I'm no longer involved in MediaWiki development or Wikimedia administration so I shouldn't be running my mouth about this. But the short list of requirements I came up with was just something which I very much expect to come up in any serious discussion about deploying OSM on Wikimedia. It's not a necessity that Wikimedia render its own tiles but autonomy is. The map feature on Wikimedia can't stop working just because the OSM server went down and the tile server is no longer responding. This could be alleviated by proxying as you point out but to do it properly (i.e. not only have a cache of recently requested tiles) the whole thing would have to be copied over periodically, and at that point why wouldn't they just run their own render farm? Besides, a local render farm would offer the opportunity for custom stylesheets and other niceties. >> * It would have to be accessible and not just availible to JS >> enabled browsers > > I'm not sure I understand this. Are you talking about users that > don't want to use JavaScript? Is this requirement different for > Wikipedia.org than for OpenStreetMap.org? Currently nothing on Wikimedia wikis requires Javascript. There's a Java player which allows you to play .ogg but you can always download the original file for example. Perhaps the attitude towards JS has changed since I was involved but in any case fulfilling this shouldn't be harder than making a special page which implemented something similar to the t...@h static browser: http://server.tah.openstreetmap.org/Browse/ >> * It would have to work with the static dumps >> (http://static.wikipedia.org/) > > Now that is a special requirement! Could you generate static HTML > that uses <table> and <div> to line up some static PNG tiles in a > static HTML page? Would this also solve the problem for browsers > without JavaScript? Right now you can get a static dump + image dump and produce a fully working copy of a Wikimedia wiki. If all the maps relied on map tiles hosted somewhere else that would break a lot of things for the static dump content wise. > And what about people who want to generate PDF for printing > Wikipedia articles in high resolution. Maybe we need to provide > SVG images as well as tiles. Are there SVG tiles? An SVG export would be nice but probably not required for a first-pass implementation of this. Anyway, there's a MediaWiki developer meetup in Berlin next month [1] and the devs that would need to be convinced of this will be there. I was informally invited by the organizer to talk about OpenStreetMap stuff but a) I really don't know anything about it b) I don't want to drop that much money on a weekend trip to Germany with the recent meltdown of the Icelandic economy. But it would be very cool if someone that *did* know something about the OSM platform were to go and talk to the people involved there about getting OSM on Wikipedia. Initially just getting it working would be nice: * Setting up their own local Planet.osm & rendering * Ability to embed maps in articles But later on there's a lot more opportunity for integration: * Nearby articles displayed on a map (like the Google Maps Wikipedia view) * Custom map rendering based on OSM maps to replace hand-drawn SVG maps now on WP * etc etc. 1. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:Developer_meet-up_2009 _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
