User:Shereth/2009 Mapping Project
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The 2009 Mapping Project is a successor to the unofficial project embarked upon by myself in conjunction with my bot, User:ArkyBot, which itself was an extension of the unofficial (but extraordinarily useful) project started by User:Ixnayonthetimmay. At its heart, the goal of the project was to replace the ugly old raster "dot-on" maps being used in the majority of United States place articles with shiny new SVG vector maps, complete with corporate boundaries.
The first maps were created by hand and that took a lot of time, as there are many thousands of locations in the country. I created a script that used data files from the United States Census Bureau to largely automate the process, and as a result many thousands of US place articles are using maps created as a part of that project. In that regards, the project was largely a success.
However, there were some flaws with the maps. For one, they used data from 2000 and were already outdated in many cases. Secondly, deficiencies in the data meant that shorelines were not always accurately rendered and reflected political boundaries better than physical boundaries.
The 2009 project aims to correct these deficiencies by updating the data with 2009 boundaries, as well as overlaying accurate shorelines on the maps to make them look more as they are expected.