Map project international

Hello.

Many of the maps used in Wikipedia are taken from English or other large language projects, especially the CIA World Fact Book. This is unfortunate, because other languages should have maps in their own languages, not in English (German, French, or whatever), for these Wikipedias to be maximally useful to people speaking those languages.

For this reason, I want to launch a map translation project. The truth is that you do not need to know a language to translate a map. It is very simple graphic work, involving the replacement of place name labels in one language with labels in another language. You can do that on virtually any basic graphic program, clean up a little, and voila!, you have a new map, ready to be put into place. The map should be posted in Commons, so that other people will have access to it.

I am looking for volunteers to help with this project. If you are interested, please sign up here:

Danny

Also, if you would like maps translated into your language, please post them here (please, keep the list no longer than 10 maps. Once a map is completed, you can replace it with a new request):

XXX
XXX

Since some of the terms will be a little tricky, if you are making a request, please note any difficult terms here, and how they should be translated. This list will gradually be transported to various Wiktionaries.

Xxxx

Waiting to hear from you.

Concerning on international usage, Some images like en:Image:Africa by gdp.png and Image:Laws on homosexuality.PNG doesn't need any textual legends embedded in image itself. Image with no text, and separated descriptions by language would be reasonable. --Puzzlet Chung 11:37, 18 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Maps with no names only work when the shapes are familiar and well understood. A completely nameless street map of Oslo can be useful only to people who already know the city. Telling from the green colored map which of Ghana or the Ivory Coast has the higher GDP requires that the reader knows the African countries. Otherwise the map only becomes a colored random mosaic. --LA2 6 July 2005 23:51 (UTC)

See also