Wikimapia

Wikimapia (stylized as wikimapia) is a geographic online encyclopedia project. The project implements an interactive "clickable" web map that utilizes Google Maps with a geographically-referenced wiki system, with the aim to mark and describe all geographical objects in the world.

Wikimapia was created in Russia by Alexandre Koriakine and Evgeniy Saveliev in May 2006. The data, a crowdsourced collection of places marked by registered users and guests, has grown to just under 28,000,000 objects as of November 2017, and is released under the Creative Commons License Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA). Although the project's name is reminiscent of that of Wikipedia, and the creators share parts of the "wiki" philosophy, it is not a part of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation family of wikis. Since 2018, following years of declining popularity, the site has gone nearly inactive with the site's owners having been unable to pay for the usage of Google Maps and the site's social media accounts having remained derelict. A study from 2017 remarked that the site's popularity was in a steady decline since 2012.

After the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the page was closed on March 2, 2022. As of March 13, 2022 access to the site was met with the following message: "Wikimapia is turned off for some time (days or even weeks). The site is under cyber attack all these days. Stay tuned. Explanation later." Their Facebook page indicated they were hit by a DNS attack(s?) after a request was made to remove Ukrainian military installation listings, which was not immediately honored. However, an older version of Wikimapia was still accessible despite the page being closed. After two weeks, the page went back and reopened on March 25, 2022.