Find 10,000 digitised maps this weekend

Rather than the usual WikiProject Report, this week our guest author Jheald is telling us about a campaign to identify thousands of old maps which have been digitised, to make them available for georeferencing and upload -- User:Rcsprinter123

Just under a year ago, the British Library posted a million images to Flickr Commons from scans of 19th century books. Since that time almost 20,000 have been uploaded to Wiki Commons, often as complete sets from whole books. Progress has been slow because, although for a small number of images it is easy enough to upload, rename, describe and categorise the images to make them properly findable and usable on Commons, to do this for larger numbers of images becomes quite a time-consuming process.

One class of images that would lend themselves very readily to bulk upload would be old maps. About two-thirds of the books that were scanned were 19th century guide books, travel books, ethnography books, geography books and history books about various parts of the world, which contain quite a large number of maps. Maps have the advantage that once their co-ordinates are known, they can be uploaded to Commons in bulk, and automatically be allocated to appropriate categories, to make them usable and discoverable.

About 3,000 maps that have already been found are plotted on this map of the world, the result of the BL's popular (and addictive) Georeferencer crowd activity. Each red dot can be clicked on to reveal a map (or the ground-plan of a building), which can also be laid over a modern map for comparison. (Similar functionality should be available soon for maps already on Commons, through the Commons:Wikimaps project, expected to go fully live next year).

However, before they can be placed on the globe, the key first stage is simply to identify which of the files on Flickr are in fact maps. There are an estimated 10,000 more in the collection, as yet unidentified. The BL is ready to start another round of georeferencing as soon as it has a list of the files that are maps. So that is what the Mechanical Curator project on Commons would like to spearhead this weekend, starting on Friday 31st at 11:00 UTC -- to find all the maps, and tag them all on Flickr.

To approach the task systematically, the campaign will be using a set of geographical index pages on Commons that have been built up for the books that were scanned to make the collection. These pages are linked from a status page showing the project's current progress.

What is needed then should be quite simple. It's for somebody to pick part of the index that interests them, then open the pink  Untagged maps?   templated link for each book entry for that part of the index, to go through to the Flickr page for that book (from which anything already tagged as a map will have been excluded).

Scrolling down the Flickr page, if it has maps, the campaign is asking people to

• first edit the wiki entry, copying-and-pasting-and-changing the {{UntaggedMaps|sysnum = nnnnnnnnn}} template to add a "Has maps" template {{HasMaps|sysnum = nnnnnnnnn}} before it, which adds a maps link;

Nota bene: in July 2023 this template was deleted.

• then go through the page on Flickr, opening each map (or ground plan) and tagging it on its Flickr image page with the word 'map'. (Note that you need to be logged with a Flickr account to be able to add tags, which can be found on grey buttons below the image).
• then, once there are no more maps to tag, edit the wiki entry again to remove the "Untagged maps" template.

Alternatively if there were no maps (which will be the case the majority of the time), simply replace the {{UntaggedMaps}} template with the words no maps.

The British Library has also requested that Flickr tags split, conical and world be added, as well as the tag map, respectively, for images that need to be split because they contain more than one map; for images that contain a map on a conical projection (rather than the usual rectangular projection); and for images containing a single-sheet map of the world; also rotatec and rotatecc for maps that need to be rotated clockwise or anti(or counter)-clockwise.

As the campaign proceeds, the status page will count the proportion of "Untagged maps" templates so far removed, the index pages with the largest numbers still to go, and the total number of new Flickr map tags added.

Browsing through the geographical index is also a great way to find out what other images there are in the collection, that might be useful, and worth uploading.

To launch the campaign, there will be an all-day Digital maps Halloween tagathon on Friday 31st at the British Library in London, between 10:00 am and 4:30 pm. If anyone reads this in time and can make it, please do drop by! (If you read it in time to have registered first, even better!)

The BL Labs group will also be holding its annual symposium on Monday 3rd November. Tickets may now be limited, but it would be a fantastic demonstration of the power of openness, if the whole of the index (or the lion's share of it) could have been worked through by that point. (Also, the sooner all the maps have been found, the sooner the BL can start a new round of georeferencing to make them useful).

There are a little over 13,000 book titles in the index, so if everybody gave an hour, or even half an hour, to take out a block of 15, the whole lot could be done by the end of weekend.

Update (Monday 3 November, 10:00 UTC) The BL Labs symposium had about 200 attendees today, and I was hugely proud to be able to say that as Wikipedians we had added 5,300 map tags since Friday, with 70% of the collection still to go. (As I write the number is 5,800 and continuing to rise steadily). Some large swathes of the globe have been taken out by particularly active contributors -- France, Germany and Australia in particular; and Africa which was tagged hard during the event on Friday. Index pages that remain with large numbers of Flickr book pages still to be examined include in particular those for the United States and U.S. history, and for the various nations and regions of the U.K. -- see the central status page for links for these and other parts of the world, as well as the latest total counts. All help looking through these would be very much appreciated -- as well as the maps (and ground plans) for tagging, you may well also find other interesting or useful non-map views that may be worth considering or uploading for articles on wherever in the world you happen to be most interested in.