User:Zverik/How do you map in Russia
You've probably seen Russia on the map. It is the great white field named "Россия" on zoom 2, even bigger than "Kalaallit Nunaat", whatever that is :) Some people, even in our country, often wonder: do they ever map at all? Well, we do, in our way.
Mapping efforts in Russia have been greatly influenced by Soviet military initiative of mapping the whole world, known as "Genshtab maps". Those classified maps were stolen and then made public in 1992, and after that the question rises again and again: why do we need other maps? Nothing the community or commercial carthographers do can come close to those military maps, so we'd better use the latter.
Alas, number of active mappers in Russia doesn't match its size. In nineties the country was flooded by pirated software, movies and music, and that destroyed any respect for copyright law. It became usual to expect any digital data to cost nothing. As people were suprised ten years ago to find out that movies and music cannot be copied freely, so they are clueless about copying maps now.
Russian mapping community consists mainly of cats (most of which show off in this forum thread).