The Q-BAM Improvement and Core Thread
- Thread starter iori
- Start date
Not only was it never finished, it's not really that accurate.
Well we need to pull together a group to finish it all. That'd be helpful for alot of people if it were completed accurately
Are we ever going to finish this as well? Or is this also one of those things where we finished it on another thread
It would be good already to change poorly made maps when there is a more accurate, to say the least, equivalent avaible.
Case in point.
814 as in the current list
814 as avaible and much more accurate.
I'll be blunt, tough : some maps (while not all, of course, more it's recent chronologically, better it is) in this list are a bit too lazily done and researched to be that usable. It's one of the reason I work on a 117 AD map right now : granted it takes time, but there's some result at the end.
I agree I sound nothing as remotly modest there, but I acknowledge the value of literraly weeks (more months) of litterary research; which I do because I like to do something accurate, and because I think people might want actually good maps as well.
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Why have you placed the oldest version of 1885? And there already are the 1919, 1945 and even 1648 and 1450 Q-Bams. You really should improve this list.
Well bugger.
The internal divisions of the US on the latest QBAM are wrong.
Long story short, most of the New York/Pennsylvania border runs along the 42nd parallel north. The Northern border of California, Nevada and Utah is also defined by the 42nd parallel. On a Robinson projection (that the QBAM is meant to follow), lines of latitude are continuous and don't curve.
Guess what? The lines don't match up, when by definition they should.
So, yeah, most of the US needs to be re-done; firstly to correct this error, then then secondly to adjust neighboring states to compensate for the initial changes.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
The internal divisions of the US on the latest QBAM are wrong.
Long story short, most of the New York/Pennsylvania border runs along the 42nd parallel north. The Northern border of California, Nevada and Utah is also defined by the 42nd parallel. On a Robinson projection (that the QBAM is meant to follow), lines of latitude are continuous and don't curve.
Guess what? The lines don't match up, when by definition they should.
So, yeah, most of the US needs to be re-done; firstly to correct this error, then then secondly to adjust neighboring states to compensate for the initial changes.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
Don't : there's serious problems in several regions, at the point it's simply easier to redo everything litterally from scratch. I can testify for this for ancient and medieval maps (but contemporary french subdivisions are really botchered too), as well as @Alex Richards as he's currently re-working Chinese rivers.
Could you work on US subdivisions, maybe? It would be helpful.
EDIT : Frankly, the work on maps got a turn for the worse, when everyone popped "totally official core thread" of their own, with every (relevant) cooperation got split or dead-ended in several threads. Couldn't we just merge these? Or close them and make it a real workshop as we did with the first "OTL map thread"?
Alex Richards
Donor
I noticed that myself with the worlda US states a while ago and did a patch for it. I suspect the problem is that the QBAM just enlarged straight from the worlda.
It isn't. QBAM and Worlda are definitely different projections from each other. There are at least three different versions of Worlda floating around. Two correspond to no standard projection; the third is Kavraiskiy-7, centred on 10° east, and with higher latitudes truncated at around 85°.
I'm not sure I understand the question.
- MBAM: QBAM, with all distances tripled.
- QBAM: Some weird hybrid K7/Robinson, with noticeable longitudinal distortion, nominally centred on 10° east, possibly with truncated polar regions (unable to verify truncation).
- Worlda variant 1: unknown
- Worlda variant 2: unknown
- Worlda variant 3: Kavraiskiy-7, centred on 10° east, and with higher latitudes truncated at around 85°.
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Alex Richards
Donor
I meant if you had a link to which version of the worlda was the latter. Because we did have a couple of major projection overhauls, so depending on the situation we might be talking about a case of 'old projections aren't actually a proper one.'
Gotcha. I didn't keep a record of which Worlda was the truncated K7 one. By that point, I had already decided that my K7 project would use a slightly larger map scale (1250px for the smallest one), in order to be clear which is actually K7, and which is worlda truncated K7 / worlda unknown. "Worlda" as a "brand", has too much of a legacy of inaccurate maps included under the label.
fwiw, I recall that only one of the maps on the a-h wiki was actually of the K7 projection.
Alex Richards
Donor
Oh great, yet another map that's going nowhere then.
The fundamental problem with every 'here's a more accurate map at a different size' is that everyone neglects the fact that the main reason people use the worlda is due to the large corpus of existing historic maps (of various levels of accuracy), borders, rivers and so on.
Now over half the historic maps need updating to some degree or another anyway, at which point if there's a version of the basemap accurate to one projection, then it's a convenient time to convert to that.
Otherwise we just have a case where you're going to be saying 'actually this one's a better map to use' and everyone else is just going to go 'is there a 1900 map on that projection? no? I'll use the old one then.'
Or, to put it bluntly, we've already got a problem with having lots of basemap projects going very slowly because everyone's working on different ones rather than trying to get one finished, and this just exasperates that.
Well clearly, when that K7 style worlda map was created, it garnered essentially zero interest. Otherwise, someone would have used it as a basis to update at least one other map. So whatever else was preventing worlda inaccuracies being fixed, it wasn't the lack of an accurate basemap.
It's all very well having a large corpus of existing maps. But if it is a large corpus of existing inaccurate maps, it's not actually all that useful, since the fixup work would require at least as much effort as simply redrawing. But seeing as how that fixup work hasn't happened yet in the years since that fixed basemap was released, odds are good it won't ever happen.
And yes, there's lots of basemap projects going on. But since they are mostly expansions of qbam/mbam, they inherit all the existing inaccuracies of those two. For me, those maps are nice drawings, but not especially accurate.
fwiw, naysayers similar to you already had the effect of killing that nascent project last year. No need to continue the naysaying
It's all very well having a large corpus of existing maps. But if it is a large corpus of existing inaccurate maps, it's not actually all that useful, since the fixup work would require at least as much effort as simply redrawing. But seeing as how that fixup work hasn't happened yet in the years since that fixed basemap was released, odds are good it won't ever happen.
And yes, there's lots of basemap projects going on. But since they are mostly expansions of qbam/mbam, they inherit all the existing inaccuracies of those two. For me, those maps are nice drawings, but not especially accurate.
fwiw, naysayers similar to you already had the effect of killing that nascent project last year. No need to continue the naysaying
Alex Richards
Donor
Well clearly, when that K7 style worlda map was created, it garnered essentially zero interest. Otherwise, someone would have used it as a basis to update at least one other map. So whatever else was preventing worlda inaccuracies being fixed, it wasn't the lack of an accurate basemap.
It's all very well having a large corpus of existing maps. But if it is a large corpus of existing inaccurate maps, it's not actually all that useful, since the fixup work would require at least as much effort as simply redrawing. But seeing as how that fixup work hasn't happened yet in the years since that fixed basemap was released, odds are good it won't ever happen.
And yes, there's lots of basemap projects going on. But since they are mostly expansions of qbam/mbam, they inherit all the existing inaccuracies of those two. For me, those maps are nice drawings, but not especially accurate.
fwiw, naysayers similar to you already had the effect of killing that nascent project last year. No need to continue the naysaying
Well, what you actually did was just start releasing the map at an absolutely humongous scale. I can't actually find anywhere where you released a worlda (or even 'slightly larger than worlda') scale map to any stage of completion, and that's the scale I'm talking about- for most people that's just too much space to try to fill and it intimidates them into not starting. Unless you're talking about this one, in which case the fact it's on a rectangle form and Antarctica being like that makes it seem like a step backwards.
Really, a lot of it's psychology. Mentally speaking, the concept of 'I've improved the coastlines/projection of this map, we've already got lots of maps using it, but we'll just have to update them' as a suggestion comes across as much less daunting than 'your projection is wrong, this one is right, we need to redo everything to this,' even if the amount of work involved is identical. If you're going to try and use the second approach, the best thing to do is to actually kick things off yourself with some historic maps.
But that's the thing, you can make things easier for yourself in a number of ways. You start with the smallest scale in the set you want to do which is immediately less daunting rather than the largest which makes the project intimidating. You start at the present and work backwards, and you produce a lot of recent year maps, each of which needs only minor alterations but suddenly means you're starting off with what psychologically feels like a significant corpus of work has already been done, because you've got 27 different historic maps, that's a good start (and having January 1st of every year since 1990 does give you the borders for a lot of the Cold War with Yugoslavia, the USSR etc.)
How's the work on Chinese rivers so far @Alex Richards? I suppose it's infuriating in the mess of contradicting infos? Because it certainly looked this way to me.