Image:Wfm area51 map en.png

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this place is filled with aliens!

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1 Summary
2 Method of production
3 Design rationale
4 References
5 Licensing

[edit] Summary

Map of federal lands in southern Nevada, including:

[edit] Method of production

a topographic map was rendered using Demis' mapserver. This combines public domain datasets and renders an image. Demis allows unlimited use of this: [1] says With this statement DEMIS BV grants you permission to freely copy the PNG images returned by our server and use them for your own purposes, including web pages.
A second version was referenced with the same geometry but with all the available layers turned on. This was used as a guideline for the positions of roads and cities, although the second rendered map is not used in the final rendered image.
The map was imported in to Inkscape where annotations were drawn in several layers over the bitmap.
Roads were manually traced from the road lines in the detail map, and cities located from that reference.
Maps (listed in references) used for reference when placing features (most features are somewhat schematic, with only moderate attention to details of precise size and location).

[edit] Design rationale

There's an argument (particularly for diagrams) that pictures shouldn't have text in them (for reasons of internationalisation). For maps that's really not practical (the map would be reduced to a giant number-matching game). As this is an SVG (and I'll upload the SVG source shortly) it's very straightforward to change the text labels for use in a different language wikipedia.
There are lots of small airstrips (such as those at Lida and Jackass) that aren't on the diagram. To avoid filling the map with pretty trivial airstrips, only the military/DOE ones and civilian ones with hard-surfaced runways are shown.
Similarly, there are a lot of smaller settlements, surface features (valleys, mountains, etc.) and roads. By and large the policy for inclusion was to include significant items and items which have (or are related to) an existing or anticipated wikipedia article.
The giant size of the image is for two reasons - firstly, it's a consequence of the poor resolution of current computer monitors - to even remotely approach the detail available in an ordinary paper map (which this doesn't - it would have to be five times bigger to have as much detail even as a regular Rand McNally road map) the image has to be big. Secondly, when a page is printed (realistically when a wiki page rendered with a print-smart wikireader renderer is printed) the resolution is much higher, and 1000 pixel wide images would look very blocky when rendered on an A4 page.
Writing county names along the edges of the map is something that's occasionally done by professional mapmakers, and now I see why. There are already enough overlapping zones (the NAFR/DNWR overlap is already more complex than I'd like), so this is a neat way to write them without making the main map a complete mess.

[edit] References

USGS Topo maps
GIS data in NASA World Wind
NationalAtlas
Dreamland resort
Groom Lake Desert Rat
Glenn Campbell
FAA Aeronautical chart
Wikipedia maps of Nevada and the western USA
Nevada DOT air transportation map

[edit] Licensing

I, the author of this work, hereby publish it under the following license:

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".