User Guide: Wikimapia's URL

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Advanced users may occasionally find it useful to know how to decode the variables in Wikimapia's URL.

Primary URL

An example Wikimapia URL is http://wikimapia.org/#lat=53.9560855&lon=-1.9335937&z=3&l=0&m=a&v=2. The purpose of each of the variables is:

Variable	Purpose
lat=	The latitude of the centre cross in decimal degrees
lon=	The longitude of the centre cross in decimal degrees
z=	The zoom level. The closest available tends to be the range z=14 to z=18 but there are exceptions such as the oceans or major cities.
l=	A numerical id for the language
m=	The map type: w=Wikimapia map, b=Satellite/Satellite + old places, m=Google map, h=Google hybrid, s=Google satellite, t=Google terrain), a= automatic (deprecated in beta).
v=	The option selected in the view menu: 0=All places, 1=No places, 2=All places, 3=User map, 5=Roads view (deprecated in beta), 4=Deleted places, 6=Roads edit (will not be activated just by linking).
search=	Some text to place in the search window (and search on).
show=	An internal document to be displayed.

Note: In most cases, the URL includes the '#' sign. If this is the case and you only change something to the right of the #, you need to refresh the page after having made your modification and hitting enter. The '#' actually points to an "anchor" named like what follows it inside the page. Despite the fact that this anchor does not really exist, the browser "believes" that it has to stay at the same page.

Geotools URL

Take as an example: http://wikimapia.org/ #lat=-15.7747435&lon=-47.9143596&z=16&l=9&m=a&v=2&gz=0;-479177713;-157770563;29611;0;0;1033;0;58439

The parameters before "&gz=" are a regular Wikimapia URL as described above.

The parameters following "&gz=" are:

1. type (0=distance measure; 1=area measure)
2. longitude of origin point (the westernmost longitude of all your points)
3. latitude of origin point (the southernmost latitude of all your points)
4. degrees longitude between 1st point and origin
5. degrees latitude between 1st point and origin
6. degrees longitude between 2nd point and origin
7. degrees latitude between 2nd point and origin
8. degrees longitude between 3rd point and origin
9. degrees latitude between 3rd point and origin
10. etc.

Notes:

• The degree parameters should be read as if they have 7 decimal places. For example, 109899353 is really 10.9899353.
• The origin may not be a point in your geotools measurement list since its longitude and latitude may come from different points in your list. The reason for using this point as the origin may be so that all location offsets from it are guaranteed to be positive.
• The order of the position entries is different to the lat/long in the URL. This is probably because in a graph a position is usually indicated by (x,y), ie a horizontal (x) and vertical (y) pair.

Place URL

Places in Wikimapia have internal id numbers like an SSN, starting at 1. For instance, place #1 is a supermarket in a southern suburb of Moscow: http://wikimapia.org/1/Auchan-Kommunarka-hypermarket . You can also shorten this to just http://wikimapia.org/1/ if the title is not desired. Since no lat/long is provided in the URL, the page will show up with a small satellite image of the place in red and you can click on the red place to see the regular wiki page and the satellite image centered on that place and zoomed appropriately.