Crowdsourcing Imagery Analysis (Wikimapia)

I have written previously about the value of the Google Earth Community for leads and other hard to find information concerning virtually any geographic location. Tasks like identifying and describing geographic locations on a map are perfect for crowdsourcing, where lots of people throw a little bit of time at a project. While I would not center my business, law enforcement or military plans around such data, it can provide very useful leads.

Wikimapia, which is very much like the Google Earth Community, allows users to post data concerning any place in the world. When this service first came out, I didn't think it would be able to compete with the Google Earth Community. Apparently, I was wrong.

I gave Wikimapia a second look today (Thanks, Rachel!) and was very impressed with the quantity of information and detail available. Take a look at the image of Bushehr Iran below.
Of course this is just a screenshot and I added the title and the website but the yellow box highlighting the Iranian HAWK site is all Wikimapia. Yeah. I thought it was pretty cool, too.

All of the little white boxes are sites that have been identified as something by someone. A good number of the sites identified are in the native language of the country making this a useful training tool for linguists as well.

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