Wikiatlas

The Wikiatlas or Wikimedia Atlas of the World (or Commons Atlas)
is a wiki-portal on the Wikimedia Commons website, related to the English Wikipedia Portal Atlas. It contains thousands of gallery pages and maps about many nations or regions of the world.

As a collection of map image-galleries, the Wikiatlas links many sets of maps, such as:
 maps of Europe, maps of Africa, maps of North America, maps of Asia, maps of Oceania,

 maps of the U.S.A., of Italy, of Germany, of China, of Taiwan,plus maps of Texas, or maps of California, and maps of Florida, etc.

Unlike Wikibooks or Wikisource, the Wikiatlas is not a separate wiki website, but rather, a large subset of the Wikimedia website.
There are many thousands of maps in the WikiAtlas.

{| style="float:left;"  style="font-size:87%; margin:7px 0 0 6px;"  cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0
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|  England map
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|  Italy map
|}

Atlas pages are map groupings
The Wikiatlas is based on some simple ideas. All maps are grouped, in the manner of a World atlas, into pages stored with the name "Atlas of..." for each continent, such as:

Similar page titles "Atlas of..." cover each nation or region, such as:

Some of the U.S. states also have Wikiatlas pages, such as:

Similarly, hundreds of other Wikiatlas pages are named as "Atlas of..." for over 200 nations and over 94 other regions of the World.

Wikiatlas page format
Many pages in the Wikiatlas are arranged in a distinctive format: with maps displayed down the left-side of the page, and explanatory text presented to the right-hand side. The description for each nation, territory, or region is written, first, in the official language(s) of the area, followed by other languages, including English.

Because the Wikiatlas is a wiki effort, developed by the Wikimedia volunteers, the level of detail and coverage varies, from section to section, of the Wikiatlas. Some groups of maps are very extensive, while other maps are rudimentary, depending on the time spent by volunteer writers.

History of Wikiatlas
The Wikiatlas was designed, during extended discussions on the Wikimedia website, beginning in 2003.
Originally, the concept was to have an "automatic" map-generator, based on giving coordinates. However, use of maps beyond mere location, led to the current vast collections of maps also showing economic areas, precipitation, average-temperature, political regions, earthquake fault-lines, etc.  To show a location was only one way to use maps.

Many thousands of maps were collected, over the years. However, by June 2005, the Wikiatlas subproject still lacked sufficient structure to be considered viable.
In April 2006, the Wikiatlas was mentioned in an archaeology
conference as a "nascent" project.
Finally, a coherent page-format was generalized during mid-2007, using page layouts stored in MediaWiki template files. Hundreds of Wikimedia and Wikipedia editors worked on various aspects of the page descriptions in over 100 languages, including uploading and modifying the thousands of map images. Some of the maps were transferred from Wikipedia image pages.

Wikimedia readership
Although readership figures are not specifically available, of the complete grouping of all Wikiatlas pages, the general readership of the Wikimedia website has been based, nearly 50% (in early 2009), within the following: United States 24.5%, Germany 10.7%, India 5.7%, United Kingdom 4.0%, and Italy 3.5%.

Notes

References
"1. Wikimedia Commons", HowWikipediaWorks.com, 2008, webpage: HowW-ch16s01 .

Other websites
 Wikiatlas main page on Wikimedia Commons.

Cartography
Wikis
Wikimedia Foundation