WikiMapia is Describing the World
On the tails of Wikipedia, Wikitravel, and Rrove comes WikiMapia, which allows visitors to annotate, tag, and describe places directly on the Google map interface. It’s definitely a neat idea–instead of surfing Wikitravel to find a particular place via reading text, you can surf around an area of the map on WikiMapia and view descriptions of interesting locations.
Each location has a “card” that holds information about it. Users can choose to view the card, and edit it if they like. Like any good Wiki, each card also has the history of edits.
Currently, there doesn’t seem to be many places with in depth descriptions. In fact, I see a lot of the cards simply referencing the corresponding Wikipedia article. It would be worthwhile for WikiMapia to somehow get access to Wikipedia’s database (and location data), if possible, and simply grab the article and place it in the card description, if possible. That way, some of the information will already be filled in.
The useful case is when people start filling in locations that are interesting, but relatively unknown, like the hidden niches in cities, parks, and other areas. This is exactly what the blog Google Sightseeing is doing, except that WikiMapia could leverage the network effects of the Wiki system to find a whole slew of cool locations. After WikiMapia matures, they should aggregate the most interesting locations and report them on a blog or a front page, a bit like what del.icio.us has recently done with their front page redesign.
The UI for WikiMapia was a bit clunky for me. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m on a slower machine, but it took quite a while to get some of their UI elements working (even though Google Maps usually zips along on my machine). Their next step should be making the entry box and UI more user friendly, which will encourage people to submit more locations.
Good luck to the WikiMapia team, and keep working at their system. WikiMapia could turn out to be a great resource, especially if they open up their API.
[Thanks to Steve Rubel for the pointer]
