Wikimapia is a geographic online encyclopedia project. The project implements an interactive "clickable" web map that utilizes Google Maps with a geographically-referenced wiki system, with the aim to mark and describe all geographical objects in the world.
Wikimapia was created by Alexandre Koriakine and Evgeniy Saveliev in May 2006. The data, a crowdsourced collection of places marked by registered users and guests, has grown to just under 28,000,000 objects , and is released under the Creative Commons License Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA). Although the project's name is reminiscent of that of Wikipedia, and the creators share parts of the "wiki" philosophy, it is not a part of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation family of wikis. Since 2018, following years of declining popularity, the site has gone nearly inactive with the site's owners having been unable to pay for the usage of Google Maps and the site's social media accounts having remained derelict. A study from 2017 remarked that the site's popularity was in a steady decline since 2012.
After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the page was closed on March 2, 2022. As of March 13, 2022 access to the site was met with the following message: "Wikimapia is turned off for some time (days or even weeks). The site is under cyber attack all these days. Stay tuned. Explanation later." Their Facebook page indicated they were hit by a DNS attack(s?) after a request was made to remove Ukrainian military installation listings, which was not immediately honored. However, an older version of Wikimapia was still accessible despite the page being closed. After two weeks, the page went back and reopened on March 25, 2022.
Main principles
According to the website, Wikimapia is an open-content collaborative mapping project, aimed at marking all geographical objects in the world and providing a useful description of them. It aims to create and maintain a free, complete, multilingual and up-to-date map of the whole world. Wikimapia intends to contain detailed information about every place on Earth.
Features
Viewing
The Wikimapia website provides a Google Maps API-based interactive web map that consists of user-generated information layered on top of Google Maps satellite imagery and other resources. The navigation interface provides scroll and zoom functionality similar to that of Google Maps.
The Wikimapia layer is a collection of "objects" with a polygonal outline (like buildings, forests, or lakes) and "linear features" (streets, railroads, rivers, ferry). Streets are connected by intersection points to form a street grid. Both kinds of items may have textual descriptions and photos attached to them. Viewers are able to click on any marked object or street segment to see its description. Descriptions can be searched by a built-in search tool. Tools for refining existing places according to category as well as measuring distances between objects are also available. Objects marked as buildings can have internal places (such as a business inside a larger office building) added.
Categories are organized in a hierarchy such that viewing by a more general category includes having the specific category included. This is such as viewing "house" includes viewing "detached house". The hierarchy is not a strict hierarchy. For instance, the category "convenience store" appears in multiple places in the hierarchy.
The interface is available in many languages, and the textual description of each item may have multiple versions in different languages. Wikimapia maps can also be embedded on other websites.
Map editing
The data in Wikimapia is derived from voluntary crowdsourcing. All users, registered or unregistered (guests), are allowed to add a place on the Wikimapia layer, but guests cannot edit places created by registered users, and have some other limitations. Using a simple graphical editing tool, users are able to draw an outline or polygon that matches the satellite image layer underneath. Each object or "tag" has specific information fields which include categories, a textual description, street address, and a related Wikipedia link. Users are likewise capable of uploading several relevant photos.
Registered users have fewer restrictions on map editing, and are able to edit and/or delete existing places as well as draw "linear features" (roads, railroads, rivers, and ferry lines). A "watchlist" could be manually set up to monitor all activity or object changes made in one or more of the assigned rectangular areas on the map.