User:NordNordWest/Maps

work in progress

Mapmaking is older than any copyright discussion. For any cartographer it was – and still is – usual business to take other maps to create an own one. If a cartographer wants to create a map completely on his own then there are only very few ways to do that:

• he starts a triangulation
• he hires a plane, makes orthophotos and starts to analyse them*
• he follows every street and railway, waterbody, edge of forests and swamps etc. with his GPS to track the lines

Doing this he unfortunately won't be able to draw a map of the whole world. Too many triangulations, too many orthophotos and he won't get all the permissions to do that, either. And then there are lots of things that cannot be seen in nature or orthophotos, e.g. boundaries (at least most of them). Today it is a little bit easier than in former times. There are lots of sources which can be used by anyone: OpenStreetMap, Vector map (VMAP) Level 0, CIA maps, there is public data for reliefs, both for land and oceans, there are even some few maps by national mapping agencies outside the United States which started to license some of their products with a Creative Commons license. This makes it quite easy to draw a map with a small scale but a map with a large scale might still be a problem for Wikimedians/Wikipedians.

Creating an own map

Making maps is different from taking photographs or creating engineering drawings. Earth's surface is given by nature, a map shows it from above. A cartographer hasn't got the possibilites of a photographer to show his subject. It is impossible to step aside for a new perspective, it makes no difference if a map is drawn in early morning or in the evening, in spring or autumn. It needs other criteria to claim a map a work of its own: a map needs to have special contents and a special graphic. The most important variables for cartographers are

• scale: There is not only one optimal scale for any topic, it is a range.
• projection: A bit tricky for hobby cartographers because every map projection has got its advantages and disadvantages and not every projection should be taken for a special topic.
• map section: Even if a map has to show a special country it is the cartographer's decision if the map only show that country (in German "Inselkarte") or also the surrounding areas (in German "Rahmenkarte"). And how much of it.
• colour: Of course waterbodies are shown in blue but there are many kinds of blue which can be used.
• style of lines: Streets can be drawn with a single line or with a contour, rivers don't need to have all the same line thickness, a boundary doesn't have to be shown with a dotted line.
• fonts: Names of waterbodies are often written in italics but this doesn't have to be. Google Maps uses a white line around every letter to make the names more readable but there is no need to copy this. There are more suitable fonts than the DejaVu fonts.
• generalization: The most powerful way to get a threshold of originality and an "own work"…