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Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Maps/Replace GeoHack with Kartographer

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Replace GeoHack with Kartographer

WikiMiniAtlas/GeoHack interface
  • Problem: Even though the Wikimedia projects now have their own map service, Kartographer, some wikis such as English Wikipedia still use the old GeoHack service hosted on Tool Forge (e.g. in WikiMiniAtlas). This is mostly just because converting the old Lua modules is complicated, not because those projects actually want to keep using GeoHack (see for example, the discussion on English Wikipedia). Additionally, the use of GeoHack (which is essentially a 3rd party service) has privacy and security concerns that would be eliminated by switching to Kartographer.
  • Who would benefit: Users of Wikipedias that haven't yet migrated from GeoHack
  • Proposed solution: Migrate en:Module:Coordinates to use Kartographer and make the module available to all wikis by bundling it with the Scribunto extension (or the Kartographer extension).
  • More comments:

Discussion

  • Switching GeoHack to Kartographer in the Coordinates module is quite simple. We did this in Russian Wikipedia almost two years ago (see ru:Module:Coordinates). There are more social issues. For example, what to do with coordinates for other planets? Or should there be links to external maps? PS: If any projects want to use Kartographer, I’m ready to help with this. — putnik 09:09, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • There are two problems here: one WMA, which is the map being presented. This is rather easy to replace even when we fully keep using geohack. That is basically what my mobile gadget does already and could be expanded to desktop easily. To replace geohack (which ALSO would replace WMA, as WMA depends on geohack) is a lower level discussion. For this I have created a sandbox version of en:Module_talk:Coordinates/testcases, which uses maplink instead of geohack where possible. I think however that the myriad of problems listed in Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Miscellaneous/Wikimedia Maps Improvements could derail any kind of discussion that would be held on it, which I personally have therfore not kickstarted yet (time and brain drain). I also see a slight problem with that the maplink created doesn't have a proper no-js target link fallback (Do we even have a ticket for that?). —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 10:15, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]
  • Personally I'd be reluctant to abandon GeoHack mostly due to Kartographer not allowing on-wiki customization for both global and regional map services (T152971, T146534). Pikne 11:54, 30 October 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Voting