Adding/editing places

Revision as of 18:43, 27 March 2012

Polygons

What is a polygon?

A polygon outlines the shape of an object on the map. It is also the first process in adding a place tag.

How do I create a polygon?

To create polygon select 'Edit map' from the menu bar and choose 'Add place' from the drop down menu.

To add a polygon to an old place or to edit an existing polygon, select 'Menu' in a place tag and choose 'Resize outline (polygon)' from the drop down menu. Alternatively, right click the polygon of place tag and select 'Resize outline (polygon)' from the menu.

I tried to add new points to a polygon, but I failed. What is the reason?

There are limits for the number of polygon dots as listed here:

Level 0 users: 200 dots

Level 1 users: 500 dots

Level 2 users: 2,000 dots

I tried to create a polygon, but I failed in making it as big as desired. Why?

There are limits for the area a polygon may cover (March 2009):

Level 0 users: ~31.64 km²

Level 1 users: ~244.14 km²

Level 2 users: ~996,006 km²

Can I delete a polygon?

No, unfortunately this isn't possible. You could reduce the polygon to the minimum of three dots (which you can drag into a most minimal shape).

Although if you think the polygon is wrong, you could delete the relevant tag and create a new tag with a new polygon. Don't forget to copy the information and photographs in all languages from the deleted tag to the new tag.

As a temporary workaround, you might decide to reduce the size of the misplaced/misshapen polygon to the absolute minimum. Tip: Enlarge the area to be edited to maximum and then delete all but three of the outlining points (small red squares) by placing the mouse cursor on each square, left clicking and then choosing the delete option for that particular outline point.

Can I revert a polygon to the state before it was vandalized?

No, this feature is unfortunately not provided (yet).

I added a polygon for a place but my edit count stayed the same. Why?

Polygons are being counted separately, which you can see under the stats tab in your profile.

What area of a tag should I mark with a polygon?

You should only create a polygon that outlines the immediate area of the place you are tagging. For example, you can mark the outline of a building's structure or you could mark the outline of the building's surrounding property, this should always depend on what you are tagging. Don't overlap an adjacent area that is not part of the tag.

Also keep this in mind if you are using Beta, if you do mark the object directly (and not it's grounds or property) be sure to check the building icon box in the edit menu. This will ensure the object's polygon will depict an individual building in the Map View. For tags that include external grounds, the box should not be checked, otherwise the boundaries of the polygon will represent a 'building'.

Titles

Descriptions

Street/Addresses

Building checkbox

Categories

A tag should have at least one category to increase the utility of WikiMapia. Nearly all of the most common categories have specially designed little icons that are displayed in Map view as a visual aid. A very select group of categories, including 'lake' and 'park', change the color of their polygons in Map view.

Assigning a category to a tag

Whether you are creating a tag or modifying an existing tag, the procedure for adding a category is the same. With the editing box open, look below the Description field. Five icons, each with a text label, appear there. One is "Category"; click on it, and it should display "Categories: add category", and (if any) the tag's previously added categories. Click on "add category", and a list of the top 30 most commonly used categories and their icons should appear. If the category you want appears on this list, click on it and it will be added to the tag's categories. If the category you want does not appear in the list, type the in the search field below the list and a selection of possible matches will appear. If your category appears, click on it and it will be added to the tag. If your category cannot be found, try different words for it until something apppropriate appears. Once you have have added the category or categories you wish to assign to the tag, don't forget to click 'Save.'

Removing a category from a tag

At times, you may find a tag that has an inappropriate category. To remove this category, select the tag, select 'Edit this page' from the menu in the upper left corner as usual, and position your mouse cursor over the offending category (below the Description field). A small red box with the word 'remove' will appear to the right of the category. Click remove, and the category will vanish. Once you are satisfied with the tag, click 'Save'.

The category 'Not approved' is automatically added to tags created by users who are not signed in. This category can only be removed by UL1s and UL2s, who are, of course, indicating their approval of the tag by removing the 'Not approved' category.

Common categories

The vast majority of natural and artificial objects tagged by WikiMapia's editors fall into a surprisingly small number of categories. Currently the most used category is 'village', followed by 'school'. In the Categories menu, the editing box category list, and in the filtering input box, the number in parantheses beside the category name is the total number of tags worldwide in that category. Some categories have been made into "synonyms" of others. For example, if a user chooses the category 'graveyard' for their tag, upon saving it will be assigned the 'cemetery' category.

Under-categorization

Most tags have no category at all, which is unacceptable. Most of the remainder have just one, which may or may not be the appropriate number of categories. For example, just having the category 'village' is fine for a village, as is a footbridge categorized as 'footbridge.' In other cases, such as 'school', an additional category would be appreciated by users. WikiMapians have created ancillary categories, which function as adjectives to modify the basic noun-type categories. In the case of 'school', additional categories, such as 'primary education' or 'secondary education' can be used to distinguish elementary schools from high schools. Or a school might have been deemed a landmark by the local government, so adding the category 'landmark' to the tag might be appropriate.

Over-categorization

It is not a good idea to add too many categories to a tag. For example, you may be tempted to add every amenity your town or village possesses to the tag. But your town is not a restaurant, a park, a school and a highway, it's just a town. Label the places within the town with their own tags, and add those categories to them. Adding categories that have icons and/or a color in Map view causes conflicts in those features.

Over-used categories

Certain categories are overused by inexperienced WikiMapians. For example, it is not good idea to assign every single building on a university campus to the category 'university'. This clutters up the map with little mortarboard icons and does not help users locate and identify universities when zoomed further out. Use ones like 'dormitory', 'classroom', 'lab' or 'office', alone or in combination, instead.

Some categories may seem superfluous to you, and you are not obligated to include them. For example, the category 'building' does not have be routinely used since everything humanity has made that doesn't move or lie flat on the ground is a building of some sort or another. Assigning a tag to the 'building' category may be useful in certain cases, but a tag can be complete without it.

Deprecated categories

Many categories are determined by the WikiMapia community to be useless, and are phased out by a number of methods. For example, filtering for the category 'thinking' shows that there are a handful of tags, all in India, with that category. Since their are so few of them, a single concerned editor could simply edit those tags to remove the unwanted category.

Other categories with too many tags to manually change may be merged into a single category or may be totally erased by the admins, usually after a discussion in the forum. When a category is erased, it is replaced by the category '----'.

Certain general classes of categories have usually been found to be unhelpful and typically are removed. These include personal names, surnames, names of towns and cities, abbreviations, acronyms and others which are either ambiguous, overly specific, or obvious.

Remember that categories exist to help users find things, not to overwhelm them with clutter nor to force them to guess what obscure category to filter by.

Translating categories

Each category may be translated to every language Wikimapia supports. When displaying category names, Wikimapia gives preference to language you choose as your interface language. If category name appears in a language that is not your default, this means that the category has not been translated into your language. To translate the category (or edit an existing translation), you need to find a tag with this category (consider using category filter to do this) and click on category name and the filtering window will appear. Make sure 'en' is selected from the language list at the bottom. In the menu in the upper left, choose 'Add another language', choose your language, and provide a Title and Description much as one would when translating a regular tag. You must be a UL1 or UL2 to do this. Title and description in English can not be edited.

When searching for categories other than most used ones, translated categories are followed by a specific language code, according to ISO 639-1 code to indicate which language it belongs to. If word is in your language, but there is no such code (meaning it's in English database), you should avoid using this category. Instead, you should search for an equivalent category in English (or other language you know) and translate it properly to your language. Then use this category in your tag. We would appreciate if you report in forum this possibly wrong word in category system, so that admins can take it out of English database, if necessary.

Creating categories

In the very unlikely event that the category you wish to add does not yet exist in WikiMapia, and you are a UL2, you may create a category by opening a category filtering window, selecting 'Add new category' and filling out the Title and Description fields. If you are not a UL2, and even if you are, it would be best to ask in the forum if creating the new category is a wise course of action. Once the new category is created, it must await action by the the admins to be filterable.

As of 2012, there are only five category moderators ArnoutSteenhoek, bio2935c, GILLIES, Martin67, Pica.

Photos

A photo (or photos, photograph(s)) are images that assist in describing places in WikiMapia that words cannot accurately express. We encourage you to upload photos that will help describe places, and make WikiMapia tags even more worthwhile. However, we do have some rules, mainly because WikiMapia does not wish to, nor allow its users to violate copyrights; nor should photographs and images be used to bypass WikiMapia's policy of neutral point of view.

How to Upload a photo

Click Menu > Edit > Add/Manage Photos.

Every image uploaded from your computer is stored on WikiMapia and accessible using a URL for the small thumbnail image and the large image. After adding the image, you can get it's URL by right clicking on the large image and copying it's URL. To reuse this image on other tags, simply paste the image URL into the "Enter photo URL".

Copyrights and WikiMapia

As WikiMapia's content is user-driven, we recommend that you provide your own photographs and images. This means that you are the author of the photos or images, and therefore you own the copyright to them, you are providing them under a user license, or you are releasing them into the public domain. If you do not attribute a license to your photos, then WikiMapia will assume that the photo(s) you submit are copyright of the uploader if and only if you have taken the photograph.

Keep in mind that just because something is freely available (on the web, in books, or your friend's pictures, et cetera) does NOT mean it is public domain, nor yours to upload to WikiMapia. If the images are in the public domain, please state the reasons why in a comment, and provide a source (a link from Wikipedia's photo page, for example) stating why this is so. You cannot submit any work other than your own creations into the public domain, unless it falls under a category defined by law as public domain.

If any (free) licenses exist which permit modification of the image, then please attribute the owner/supplier of the work with a source, as defined in the license agreement. "Derivative works" (collages and/or modifications of copyrighted images) are still the copyright of the original author, and does not give you the right to submit the work as your own.

If there is any debate or lack of proof about the copyright or attribution of the image, the image will be removed from WikiMapia.

Comments

Comments

Comments are where you can, well, make comments about a place. If you wish to express your personal opinion, this is the right spot for it, and not in the place description. Information that is also outside the scope of Neutral Point of View information to the WikiMapia article is also welcome in the tag, although keep in mind that unwelcome, offensive, meaningless, talk between users, or unrelated comments will be removed. However, if you have information that should be in the description, please feel free to edit the tag.

Comments live at the bottom of each place tag, and they are supposed to be written in the same language as the main page. To add a comment, click directly on the “add your comment in <Language>” message and then type in your comment. If you have not registered you will also need to add your name. When you’re done, click the Send message button (or Cancel).

On existing comments you will also see the comment’s author, a couple of voting buttons (green up-thumb and red down-thumb), and the net good/bad vote count. If you created the comment yourself these buttons are greyed out, so you can’t vote for your own comment!

Comments Q & A

What can I write in a comment

The basic rules are the same as for what you can write in the place tag’s main description field, except that here you are welcome to express an opinion. What this means is that (for example) you can say that you think this pizza place has the best pizza in town, or you thought the art gallery was really worth visiting, or you didn’t like the way you were treated at the bus station. It does not mean that (for example) you can write offensive or abusive comments, or engage in political or religious discussions, or use it as a place where you exchange messages with your friends. The basic point here is that the comments are supposed to be about the place itself, and not something else entirely.

How do I delete a bad comment?

You can vote for or against a particular comment by clicking the green up-thumb or the red down-thumb. When a comment has enough negative votes it gets tagged as "abusive", and is not immediately displayed.

This does not actually delete the comment, however. Only advanced users are able to permanently delete comments (by clicking the “stop” button), and then only those comments with a net negative vote count. If you see a comment that should be deleted, please bring it to the attention of the Forum; there should already be a topic in the "Correction Support" section for this. Be specific about which place tag and which comment(s) are offensive and we’ll see what we can do, but please translate non-English comments for us.

Why are the authors of some comments shown as blue links, but others are just black?

The names in blue are registered users (and you can click on them to see that user’s profile), whereas names in black are unregistered users.

Nested places

History

Deleting Places

Wikimapia has a feature to mark places for deletion. When marking them, the user is challenged with the question "Why you want to delete this place?" in the form of a multiple-choice question. Possible responses are listed at User Guide: Deletion criteria.

Sometimes we come across place tags that seem to conflict with the guidelines we use when creating tags. Perhaps they are “my house”, or the rectangle is much too large, or there is abusive language, or the photo(s) are inappropriate, or ... ... . Surely these place tags do not deserve to be in Wikimapia, and they should be deleted immediately, if not sooner? Well, maybe; and maybe not!

In general we should use the same guidelines when deleting places as we do when creating them, but there are some additional things to consider when deleting. For example, the place may have been vandalized (title/description deleted or changed, incorrect or silly stuff added, moved from where it was originally placed, etc. etc.), it may have been added in an incorrect language, there may be other language pages that do not deserve deletion, the possibilities are almost endless.

Golden Rule #1 with deletions is that your first thought should always be to correct the place tag’s information to make it a useful contribution to Wikimapia. So, first rest your mouse cursor over the place tag’s Menu and check some things: Is there an edit history? Is there a resize history? And check the bottom right corner for other languages.

If the place tag contains incorrect information, or maybe a mix of abuse or spam along with some good, then just edit it and put in the correct information. Or if a previous version was vandalized (Many vandals replace good, well described places with single word profanities or other rubbish.) you can restore that one (click on History, Prev, Edit and Save).

If you are 100% sure the location is wrong, just move it. If you can not move it to the right location, create a new tag in the right place, copy the required content from the old (wrongly placed) tag to the new one, and then delete the old one.

If the place tag already contains multiple languages, things can be even more complicated, since you really ought to consider (and do something reasonable with) those contents as well.

Some place tags are written in a language that is different from what it claims to be. Most commonly the English-language page contains non-English text. These are not grounds for deletion, however; you can read about this situation in the Languages section of this User Guide.

What kinds of place tags are most often deleted?

If none of the above considerations are relevant, how do you determine whether to delete a place tag? In my experience the vast majority of deletable place tags fall into one of the following categories:

1. “My house”, “I live here” - For personal houses, the thing to remember is that local conditions are different from place to place. In the US and Canada all personal homes are to be deleted, unless they meet the full criteria in the Adding section of this User Guide. In places like India, properly sized homes that have a person's full name and/or instructions on how to find their house are not deleted. [On the other hand, we would delete a place like "Nandini's House" because we assume that there's more than one woman named Nandini in India.]
2. Too big – the rectangle is MUCH too large for something that claims to be a single building, and there is no way to tell which specific building inside the rectangle is intended to be the actual described place.
3. Duplicates - Two or more tags for the same place. One of them should be edited and improved (if possible) and the other(s) deleted.
4. Inappropriate language - Places with offensive or abusive language.
5. Advertising or spam.
6. Political or religious content that cannot be effectively removed by editing - e.g. the whole tag is a partisan statement.

If there is any other problem with the place tag, don't hesitate to bring it up in the Forum. The forum's Place Deletion Requests thread is a long and ongoing thread about deletion discussions.

Deleting Places Q & A

How do I delete a place?

• If you are an unregistered or very new user (a UL0), you cannot delete a place. UL1s may delete unprotected places, and UL2s may delete protected places.
• To delete a place, please first remove any offensive language in the Title or the Description. If the polygon is disruptive, please change it to be less so, if possible. This prevents the offensive information or disruptive polygon from remaining visible during and shortly after the deletion period and from appearing in search engine results.
• Otherwise the mechanics are quite simple: just select the “Delete place” option from the place tag’s menu, and then click the Ok button.

How many places can I delete per day/week?

That depends on your user level and how long you have been registered. Initially you can only delete a handful per week, but this limit will increase (forum thread 250). So be patient!

I found some places that should be deleted, but I can't delete any more since I am only a level 1 user. What should I do?

If they are in urgent need of deletion, you can bring them to the attention of the Forum. Just post a message in the Correction Support section and tell us exactly why they should be deleted, and please translate non-English tags for us so we can determine for ourselves whether we agree with your assessment. If they are less urgent, you can just change the title to include the phrase “Marked for Deletion”. There are a number of level 2 users who regularly search for places like this and delete them, if warranted.

It is helpful if you center WIKIMAPIA on the place(s) you wish to be deleted, zoom in to an appropriate magnification and then copy the exact URL(s) visible in your browser's navigation window.

If you have a long list of such "please-delete" URLs to submit in the relevant forum, then please submit them grouped together in fives with each group separated by one line.

How long does it take for a Deletion Request to be completed?

When you complete the "How do I ..." steps above, the place is in fact not deleted immediately. It is instead flagged for deletion after a certain time has elapsed. This period of time varies, and depends on the user level of the requestor and on whether the tag is approved or non-approved. Non-approved places will disappear quicker than previously approved places, and requests by more privileged users will be completed more quickly than those of less experienced users. Until the deletion request has been completed it is still possible to cancel the request; afterwards the place will only be visible in the Deleted Places layer (although even from there it is possible to Undelete it).

How long does it take for a "deleted" place to actually disappear entirely?

There is no specific period. Places that have been deleted remain visible in the View->Deleted places layer for a period of time (so they can be undeleted, if the deletion was in error or malicious), and only after that do they disappear entirely.

Someone deleted my place. Is there a way to find out why that happened? Is it possible to register for notifications if someone requests deletion of certain places?

There is no way to be notified. But we can help you by semi-protecting your places. Then they can be deleted only by advanced users. You can undelete them and post their locations in the Vandalism section of the Forum with a request for protection.

How do I know if one of my places has been deleted?

There is no direct way to find out, but if you are a registered user, you can sort though your Created places by pressing the blue number next to it. If you have any deleted creations, then the words "deleted" will appear in red next to the title of the tag you had created. Deleted places still contribute to your “Created places” count.

In China, there are many place tags marked ?????(cn). Should I delete them?

No, you should not delete them. When you see question marks like that, it almost certainly means that it is written in a character set that you do not have loaded on your own computer. And there is an important point to note here: If you do not understand it (you cannot read the language because you do not speak it), then you should not delete it!

See also

• Deletion