The last time I checked in on Wikimapia was about three months ago, shortly after they launched. There certainly weren’t many locations mapped out yet. Amazingly enough, they have recently added their 1,000,000th location! I checked back and took a look at San Francisco, and was stunned by the level of tagging that was going on.

At each zoom level, Wikimapia allows you to browse places that have been wikied by other users. As you zoom in, the smaller plots begin to emerge. For example, at the high level in San Francisco, the major neighborhoods have been defined. Zooming in, you’ll find little pockets of information like where somebody’s cat died.

To be honest, I haven’t looked back at Wikimapia, but I will now. It’s especially been helpful in deciphering exactly where the neighborhoods in SF end and begin (which most people can sit and debate for hours on end).

On the tails of Wikipedia, Wikitravel, and Rrove comes WikiMapia, which allows visitors to annotate, tag, and describe places directly on the Google map interface. It’s definitely a neat idea–instead of surfing Wikitravel to find a particular place via reading text, you can surf around an area of the map on WikiMapia and view descriptions of interesting locations.

Each location has a “card” that holds information about it. Users can choose to view the card, and edit it if they like. Like any good Wiki, each card also has the history of edits.

Currently, there doesn’t seem to be many places with in depth descriptions. In fact, I see a lot of the cards simply referencing the corresponding Wikipedia article. It would be worthwhile for WikiMapia to somehow get access to Wikipedia’s database (and location data), if possible, and simply grab the article and place it in the card description, if possible. That way, some of the information will already be filled in.

The useful case is when people start filling in locations that are interesting, but relatively unknown, like the hidden niches in cities, parks, and other areas. This is exactly what the blog Google Sightseeing is doing, except that WikiMapia could leverage the network effects of the Wiki system to find a whole slew of cool locations. After WikiMapia matures, they should aggregate the most interesting locations and report them on a blog or a front page, a bit like what del.icio.us has recently done with their front page redesign.

The UI for WikiMapia was a bit clunky for me. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m on a slower machine, but it took quite a while to get some of their UI elements working (even though Google Maps usually zips along on my machine). Their next step should be making the entry box and UI more user friendly, which will encourage people to submit more locations.

Good luck to the WikiMapia team, and keep working at their system. WikiMapia could turn out to be a great resource, especially if they open up their API.

[Thanks to Steve Rubel for the pointer]