Wikimapia - Let's Describe the Whole World!

Wikimapia is a web service that is like a Wikipedia for places. You can add text, links, images and even YouTube videos to any place on earth. It is easy to use and easy to embed into your own web pages. As of this writing there are over 3 million place added and it seems to be growing fast.

Wikimapia was created by Alexandre Koriakine and Evgeniy Saveliev and was launched in May, 2006. It is unrelated to Wikipedia.

Now there is also a Google Earth layer available for download allowing you to browse Wikimapia information in Google Earth, which may be an even more pleasant experience. You can also use the map service on Java J2ME-enabled mobile phones and PDAs using the free Mobile GMaps application.

You can browse information in an embedded window:



To add your own places you can click on the red Wikimapia text in this embedded window to get a bigger map window where there are menus for adding places among other things.

I really like Wikimapia. It is easy to use, and the implementation works well in many different browsers. Alexandre Koriakine and Evgeniy Saveliev have made an effort to make it work in Safari as well. They have recently visited the head of research and development at Google's Moscow office. It would be interesting to hear what Google has to say about Wikimapia. Can we expect something along the same lines from Google?

More information can be found here:

Matt Jones' Wikimapia Blog
The Wikimapia Blog
Wikipedia article on Wikimapia