Wikimapy.cz

» see wiki.mapy.cz as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Seznam.cz is the Czech search engine that never lost its home market to Google, and Mapy.cz is its mapping product. In June 2006 Seznam put a MediaWiki at wiki.mapy.cz and pointed it at a problem every mapping company has: the map knows where the castle is, and knows nothing whatsoever about the castle.

Ivo Lukačovič, who founded Seznam, announced it on his blog with a line that is close to the entire product brief. If you are clever enough to know what belongs on the map, put it there yourselves. So Czech walkers did. They wrote up ruins and lookout towers, the history and the way in, and they uploaded their own photographs, all of it under the GFDL so that none of it was locked to Seznam.

It was a wiki in the full sense, running the same software Wikipedia runs, with a custom skin called smonobook whose icon set tells you what people were actually filing. There is a bike in it and there is a castle. Technet.cz put the project seventh in a June 2007 list of ten Czech Web 2.0 sites.

~ the case file ~

~ the trade ~

The arrangement was clean. Volunteers got a real audience, because their text landed in the product rather than in a wiki by itself. Seznam got point-of-interest descriptions for a national map, written for free.

I have never been to the Czech Republic and could not have read a word of this. The bargain is familiar anyway, because around 2006 every map and every directory in every country was hunting for some version of it.

~ the daily export ~

The mechanism was the good part. Articles and uploads were exported into the Mapy.cz application every business day, where they became searchable and linked back to the encyclopedia entry. Write something on a Tuesday about a tower in the Jeseníky and by Wednesday it was in the map a few million people used.

That is a tighter loop than most crowdsourcing projects of the period managed to build, and it ran for seven years on nothing else.

~ what replaced the volunteers ~

Seznam ended it on 30 November 2013. Nothing dramatic appears to have gone wrong. The content moved to a fully editorial model, written by Mapy.cz staff and adjusted on the basis of user feedback arriving through contact forms in the map interface, which is the same information flowing through a narrower pipe with employees at the other end.

Mapy.cz is still one of the two map applications Czechs actually use, and the descriptions in it are descended from text volunteers wrote.

The wiki is still crawlable in the archive, full of photographs taken on cameras of the period and filenames in a Czech that the indexer mangled on the way in. A decade after Seznam closed it, almost every company that tried this had reached the same conclusion, which is that it was cheaper to hire people.

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