OpenStreetMap
OpenStreetMap rendering in 279 languages
Posted by Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason on 22 July 2009 in English.I've put up a tileserver that renders OpenStreetMap in all 279 Wikipedia languages.
There's e.g. a German and French rendering of Europe.
See the Maps-l mailing list and the server setup notes for more info
Discussion
Comment from 42429 on 22 July 2009 at 22:15
Looks really great, but you can see how many German (and other) toponymes are still missing: Apenrade, Beuthen etc.
Some German exonymes are medieval, e.g. Raben (Ravenna).
In some cases, it would be nice to use an English (or Latin character) exonyme if there is no German exonyme available, e.g. in Bulgaria. Is ist possible to create a letter translator for non-latin characters? Camapa > Samara and Hamburg > Xambypr.
We should continue discussing the enhancement of that multilingual map.
Comment from Longbow4u on 22 July 2009 at 23:19
Could the addition of the tags not be automated somehow? Most of the places have articles in multiple languages and therefore interwiki links. I think Daniel Kinzler (WP:User:Duesentrieb) works on a multilingual project for Wikimedia Commons. He translates English Commons categories with the words for the same concepts in different languages.
Comment from 42429 on 22 July 2009 at 23:39
You have to be careful with interwiki because German Wikipedia sometimes ignores traditional German names (e.g. Allenstein). However, in many cases it may be a good idea, especially if there are no exonymes so far.
I think we should avoid to add 279 datasets for each hamlet, so we should add exonymes automatically only if they are different from the local name.
Comment from Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason on 23 July 2009 at 09:45
A reply of mine to the mailing list should answer the three above comments.
To summarize: Neat-o, want to work on it ? :)
Comment from Klenje on 23 July 2009 at 11:44
great job thanks
Comment from Zaŝa on 24 July 2009 at 13:23
Looks nice to see the map in Esperanto. http://cassini.toolserver.org/tile-browse/browse-eo.html My world wide translation of all countries finally payed of. But for some reason I can't zoom in. Is there only the world wide zoom-level or is there a problem with the server?
Comment from Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason on 24 July 2009 at 13:26
Zaŝa: You can zoom in, but sometimes you'll get a blank screen so you'll have to wait a bit before that area gets rendered.
My crappy thrown-together tilebrowser doesn't have the "More OSM Coming soon" 404 tile so it's not as friendly.