User talk:Yurik

An award for you!

	The Wikivoyage Barncompass
	Thanks for your work on the new maps, and moreso for being amazingly responsive to bug reports. I expected it would take a couple of days to resolve the mapmask issue, but I think you had it fixed in a matter of hours - truly impressive and appreciated. -- Ryan • (talk) • 15:53, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

Thank you Ryan! I'm sure I will be breaking things frequently in the next few days as I make more changes to the map, so keep sending feedback and bug reports :) --Yurik (talk) 15:58, 10 June 2016 (UTC)

Listing and maps

Please stop experimenting in Listings and Map templates. Let have a new method that is not a regression before going live. --Traveler100 (talk) 14:21, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

Traveler100, did I break something? Most changes are being done after being tested. --Yurik (talk) 14:22, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

We have lost functionality on the maps, messed up listing numbers on itineraries and appear to be added a new method to listings without discussion. --Traveler100 (talk) 14:24, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

Traveler100, the new method on listing was specifically added to fix the itinerary. Check out Rheinsteig and Wales_Coast_Path. Maps have been enabled on Wikivoyage for months for experiments. Now I switched it over, and I am rapidly fixing all the minor cases that were not noticed before. If I was to start a discussion about each tiny change with template parameters, we would never get anything done (that's why Nupedia failed and Wikipedia succeeded, also be bold). If you think something specific should be changed or altered or is being done badly, sure, lets discuss it on the forum :) --Yurik (talk) 14:42, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

Introduction of myself and Kartographer proposals

Tracked in Phabricator ^(?)
Task T140083

Tracked in Phabricator ^(?)
Task T140087

Tracked in Phabricator ^(?)
Task T140092

Besides DerFussi I am one of the admins and programmers at WV/de. Because we are very busy I can contact you only today. Now we are checking the opportunities of the Kartographer, and we partly implemented it. After my first checks I added three tasks shown beside.

A more complicated question is where to store tracks and masks. At WV/de we use GPX subpages, at WV/en GPX templates are used. I do not like these declarations. I prefer a storage at Wikidata including imports and exports of GPX and other track data. These data could be used on all WV branches and WMF projects. We should discuss with the Wikidata community and programmers how to implement this.

We should involve User:Mey2008 because he is the programmer of the tools which are in use up to now and therefore an expert on maps. Unfortunately he is now confronted with problems and bugs using the Kartographer extension but he needs additional information which is not yet documented.

An important feature for all communities is a map showing nearby articles. We need it to change over to the Kartographer. Is it possible to make nearby information available on WV/de, too? --RolandUnger (talk) 14:22, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

RolandUnger, thanks for your note and tasks! I have proposed two solutions for the GPX: storing GeoJSON data in dedicated pages on Commons phab:T137930 (accessible from all wikis), and getting data directly from the OSM database (see demo). The nearby articles feature exists in English, and will work the same way in German WV. It downloads the data from the existing maps service. --Yurik (talk) 17:30, 12 July 2016 (UTC)

Today I added a workaround (show parameter) to the {{Marker}} template so all markers are now shown if you click on a marker symbol. --RolandUnger (talk) 04:44, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

RolandUnger, I think we should delete all (or at least most) of the parameters instead of adding them. Module:Map can handle "parent" arguments, which means that the {{marker}} may contain almost no parameters, and the {{listing}} or {{see}} could specify all the needed stuff. Example: User:Yurik/Sandbox/Nested2 (which uses User:Yurik/Sandbox/Nested1 - that has no arguments). Of course that means we might need to rethink the structure of the templates - because it can only support two levels -- User:Yurik/Sandbox/Nested3 does not show debug information, but if it was using Nested1, it would. --Yurik (talk) 09:44, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

I know that my additions could be only a workaround to generate a map behavior as expected. Done because some English-branch authors are angry about missing features and bugs of the Kartographer. I think that this is not mainly a problem of parent arguments – {{listing}} uses markers like stand-alone markers. Both templates, {{Marker}} and {{Mapframe}} which differ only in the map center position and zoom level, use now a default show argument with a big list of group ids. This problem will become bigger if we are introducing customizable markers. That's why I proposed task T140083 to introduce the all parameter for the show argument to simplify the specification of the show argument. Maybe it is a design bug of Kartographer to do not show all by default.

By the way, as of July 11, 2016 Mapquest stopped direct tile access. --RolandUnger (talk) 10:39, 13 July 2016 (UTC)

Maps on hewikivoyage

Hi Yurik, How can we update our maps on hewikivoyage to the new Kartographer's maps? Thanks, Dekel E (talk) 12:08, 16 July 2016 (UTC)

@Dekel E: technically you don't need to do anything - just simply start using it as described in mw:Help:Kartographer. If you want some extra functionality, you might want to copy (adapt) MediaWiki:Kartographer.js. Lastly, if you already have some useful templates like {{see}}, you might need to change those templates a bit. I am still working on optimizing them here on en-wv, but it should get you started. Let me know if you have any problems. --Yurik (talk) 21:55, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

@Yurik: What do I have to change on the listing templates? Don't I need to add something to Mapframe and marker templates? Thanks and sorry if you don't understand my English. Dekel E (talk) 07:25, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

@Dekel E:, I will have to look at he-wiki to see what needs to be changed, but I won't have time to look at it any time soon - there are two conferences in Seattle this weekend, and I need to prepare for them. Plus we are enabling maps on hewiki, meta, cawiki, and possibly a few more - so that we can get some feedback. --Yurik (talk) 21:19, 19 July 2016 (UTC)

No reaction on Phabricator tasks

As you know I opened several tasks on Phabricator to improve the Kartographer. But it seems that there are no reactions. Some authors on the German Wikivoyage are really angry because of the bugs. For instance, today they asks why the autonumbering stops with 99 instead of 999. Please tell me what I can do to support you and the WMF. I ask you to contact user May2008 to improve the Kartographer. --RolandUnger (talk) 07:17, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

RolandUnger, my apologies for not replying earlier. There was a big conference (SOTMUS) that we all attended in order to build better ties with the OSM community and figure out how to proceed with the map development. This is a fairly slow process simply because we only have 3 developers dedicated to the maps efforts, which includes infrastructure, features, and map quality. For comparison, Google map efforts have over 500. Moreover, I will be on vacation for a bit due to some family matters. I will attempt to answer all the pending phab tickets, but please be patient - maps is a very new WMF product, and we are still solving a large number of outstanding issues and missing functionality (that is mostly reported by users, for which I'm very thankful). Also, I hope WV DE community doesn't get angry just because the new functionality is not perfect from the start - it always takes some time to improve. --Yurik (talk) 04:33, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

Of course I understand. But it is really difficult to explain authors from the English and German communities why things are not working now which were functional before. And some authors getting ugly. To prevent this I told you to contact May2008 because he was the programmer of the hitherto existing tools and has therefore the knowledge of a lot of problems. And I hope he will collaborate because he is angry, too. Because he was blew off and had to give support for a project he wasn't involved in.

Have a nice holiday with your family! --RolandUnger (talk) 05:29, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

RolandUnger, I appreciate you reaching out to me. I feel we should have ways for the community to talk to the devs. If you look at the en-wikivoyage, there are hundreds of maps-related comments, and as you can see, most of them have my reply. You can imagine the time it took to answer those comments instead of coding, yet I still feel it was valuable because it gave me better understanding of what functionality was needed the most. That's why I am very happy that you reached out and summarized those issues as phabricator tickets - great help for me! This said, I have not really worked with DE community as I don't speak the language. Moreover, I was not involved in the migration, so I cannot really say what the issues are, how they are different from enwv, etc. I do hope that May2008 can talk to me so we can try to solve it - being angry without telling me is not very productive :) Lastly, just FYI - Mapquest stopped their tiles service, just in case you were using it. --Yurik (talk) 06:56, 27 July 2016 (UTC)

GPX Files, Geoshapes and other things

Privet (Привет):

• User:Yurik/Sandbox/Gpx1 and User:Yurik/Sandbox/Gpx2 -- I took a quick look at them and fixed the LineString in some of the maps so that they would become visible - mostly the # was missing for the hex color codes in stroke:. I hope that was OK to do.
• Trans-Siberian Railroad -- I converted the GPX file by hand to a maplink and put it on that article page so the routes would show on the mapframe in the article as a temporary measure until future work on GPX etc. has progressed. I think I did some notes on the Template Mapframe Talk page.
• I did some minor conversion work of my own by reading the GPX template files and converting some of them to maplinks using a Lua Module. I noticed that there were some inconsistencies with the way they were written in the templates while coding to convert them... I remembered that you had done some work doing conversions so I stopped what I was doing. Most of them seemed fairly easy to convert. (I didn't do colors but randomly selected them.)
• I often add or use a group name in a mapframe to avoid something like this: Group:_3658f0b2f530620d873fb17def72a85b00c53232 in the layers box.
• Concerning Geoshapes:
  • Some GPX templates can also be converted to Polygon instead of LineString ie. Example: TEST ANAHEIM GPX - Polygons can be coded to just show the line, a line and filled in area or a line and solid filled in area. Other tests can be seen on that page as well. Just a thought...
  • Geoshapes can use colors other than that dark gray/gray color
  • Multiple Geoshapes can appear on a mapframe along with POI's etc.
  • Not all external shapes exist yet for many places but I imagine that will improve as well
• I also added some notes to mediawiki.org - talk Maps about some of the things I have been looking at or found.
• Note that maplink with text="" is hidden on an article page.
• Most of the things I have played around with are with maplinks though a lot of these elements can be or should be contained within a mapframe as features.
• In the layers box in a mapframe on a map sometimes the layers are there and other times missing -- though when expanded to a full screen they are present. I keep thinking its a timing issue or because of some condition caused by the elements that go into creating it.
• I hope you are doing well and not getting overwhelmed with all your hard work on maps etc. -- Matroc (talk) 05:05, 4 October 2016 (UTC)

Matroc, awesome update!!! I will do one myself then :) You can now put SPARQL queries without URL encoding directly into the geojson (see examples). About GPX - try to see if you can find any of the geoshapes in OpenStreetMaps (a relation), and if it's there, make sure it has a Wikidata ID associated with it. This way you won't have to store the data on Wiki anymore, and there is a whole community maintaining the accuracy of that data. Also, in full screen mode there is now links to various external services if you click the "details" button at the bottom. We are actively working on getting mapframes to all of Wikipedias, hopefully it will be done fairly soon. Ping me with any specific questions, will be happy to answer. As always, any help with improving our documentation or suggestions is welcome :) --Yurik (talk) 22:32, 7 October 2016 (UTC)

Geoshape group name; if exists, is not being picked up correctly for layers box on map -- rather the coding appears instead:
Group:{"type":"ExternalData","service":"geoshape","url":"https://maps.wikimedia.org/geoshape?getgeojson=1& .... и так далее - should be an easy fix -- Matroc (talk) 04:01, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

Matroc, I'm sorry I do not understand what you mean. Could you give a full example of what's not working? Thanks! --Yurik (talk) 15:23, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

Yurik - Travellers' Pub - Maps with extra layers on en-Wikivoyage - there is a map of India - open up the map to full screen - take a look at the layers box. Each of the geoshapes has a group=name but they do not appear. (Group mapshade for India and group Pakistan for Pakistan) - instead I see code or text for requesting their particular ids info for External Data geoshape - Same for your US map lower down the page and open it full screen -- Hope that helps... I figure there is a lot of work going on that caused this and would probably be rectified later - Matroc (talk) 21:40, 16 October 2016 (UTC)

Tracked in Phabricator ^(?)
Task T148346

Matroc, thanks for reporting! I filed a bug, should be fixed soon. --Yurik (talk) 21:54, 16 October 2016 (UTC)