After a long period without updates, I'm glad to announce a new release of WikiPlaces app which brings proper support for the latest devices and iOS versions. WikiPlaces provides access to Wikimapia.org — a collaborative mapping project with the aim to describe every location in the world.

In practice it means that wherever you are, most likely you will be able to learn a lot of interesting details about places around you. I personally often use it when I see an interesting/strange/mysterious building, monument, factory, area or anything else, and want to know what that is.

Wikimapia.org content is available in many languages, and the application is free.

Problem

Wikimapia.org is a great community project providing information about places all over the world you won’t find anywhere else. And for many years WikiPlaces has been the first and only native application to access Wikimapia on iOS devices. Unfortunately, Wikimapia API was very unstable and many times users were not getting any information in WikiPlaces and blamed me for problems I can not fix.

During these years I had several discussions with different Wikimapia. team members about WikiPlaces, their API, and possible cooperation. Many things were promised to me but always those people just disappeared.

This wasn’t that important until recently particularly because things like API usage limits didn’t work either.

With the release of new Wikimapia API that allowed to add support for viewing comments and photos to WikiPlaces, they also started to enforce API usage limits for “unverified” applications. I contacted Wikimapia team once again to discuss how to verify WikiPlaces but after couple emails they just stopped responding to my messages, as usual.

Solution

In WikiPlaces 3.0 users now can specify their own Wikimapia API key to be used instead of the shared one, and I encourage all users getting just a blank map in WikiPlaces to do this.

Just go to http://wikimapia.org/api?action=my_keys and create your own API key (Wikimapia account is required), and then enter it on advanced settings screen in WikiPlaces.