Wikipedia:Graphics Lab/Map workshop/Archive/Apr 2025

Request: New Location maps of Angola are needed. Province and municipal division was changed in August 2024.

• 
  Outdated Location Map of Angola. New additional border lines are needed: a) Cuando Cubango Province was split into two provinces. b) New Icolo e Bengo Province was separated from earlier much larger Luanda Province. c) Moxico Leste Province (i.e. East Moxico) was separated from Moxico Province.
• 
  Relief locator with outdated administrative borders. Same corrections are needed as in previous map.
• 
  Example of outdated location map of a province. Eastern part of this Moxico Province is now Moxico Leste. In practice, all 21 provinces need new location maps.

Article(s)

Very many geography related articles of Angola. For example, all maps of the article Provinces of Angola needs to be updated with new administrative borders. All articles of current provinces of Angola need a new location map. Cities and other locations in Angola typically use Template:Location map, and the background maps of Angola used needs to be updated. Perhaps this one replaces the existing administrative and topographic maps of Angola used in the country template, with newer ones?

Request

The Law on the political-administrative division of Angola of 22 August 2024 changed the provincial and local division of the country. As a result, Angola now has 21 provinces instead of 18, and the number of municipalities has almost doubled from 164 to 326. You can read about this e.g. in Provinces of Angola, and in some other wikipedias like fi:Angolan maakunnat (and about current municipalities: fi:Angolan kunnat), which have updated their content already.

The Angolan law 14/24 describes the boundaries of each administrative region, province by province and municipality by municipality. I found that only few news media published a map showing the main features of the new regional division, here is one which could help: Unfortunately, some of the official publications, like the presidential decree 268/24, included a map with distorted proportions (Angola has been flattened in a north-south direction).

As a result, at the very least, the general administrative and topographical map of Angola should be renewed (c:Category:Location maps of Angola). As a next step, these should be updated in the relevant map template used in pushpin maps for Angola (Angola#Africa). The articles of municipalities (município) or their possible subdivisions (comuna), including cities, towns and other populated places, typically use these pushpin maps. Then, the maps showing the location of each province (c:Category:SVG locator maps of provinces in Angola (location map scheme)), should be updated, to reflect the new administrative division. It has already entered into force in principle, although the change will be implemented gradually over the period 2025-2027. If possible, consider creating 1-2 maps also in the c:Category:SVG labeled maps of administrative divisions of Angola (location map scheme)? At some point, also the Angola map covering the 326 municipalities could be generated, but I think this is not the most urgent issue.

BR, -- Paju~enwiki (talk) 05:10, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

References

Discussion

Hi. I was just wondering if there were an easy way to get current administrative borders.. But e.g. website https://www.topogis-ao.com/arquivos-sig-e-cad seems to have shapefiles of the old DPA division of Angola, the new is not yet there... This website suggests, that their data originated from: (Portuguese: Ministério da Administração do Território). Perhaps someone who speaks Portuguese could contact the ministry and ask for an update? It would be also in their interest that Wikipedia updates the maps of Angola.

On the same occasion, it is definitely worth asking what the ministry considers to be the area of each province in square kilometres (and as a check, ask for the total area of the state). The argument could be that numerous official websites (such as https://governo.gov.ao/angola/provincias, and the provincial websites linked to it) currently have incorrect information about the area of many provinces even before the new political-administrative division.

However, I think the correct data could be requested directly from the national geodetic institute. In Angola the national geodetic (mapping research) institute is (Portuguese: Instituto Geográfico e Cadastral de Angola, IGCA, https://www.igca.gov.ao/; earlier also Portuguese: Instituto Geodesía e Cartografia de Angola, per https://www.igca.gov.ao/historia). It works under the Ministry of Planning, Urbanism, and Construction (Portuguese: Ministério das Obras Públicas, Urbanismo e Habitação, MINOPUH, https://minopuh.gov.ao/). I currently cannot access e.g. ESRI ArcGIS license which I could use for free commercial purposes, so I request that somebody else could do this... --Paju~enwiki (talk) 06:29, 21 March 2025 (UTC)

As no response came here, this request was sent to Commons User:NordNordWest. --Paju~enwiki (talk) 02:25, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

User:NordNordWest has made the requested updates. User:NordNordWest even updated the new maps in numerous Wikipedia projects. Fantastic! Should we mark this as Done? --Paju~enwiki (talk) 00:52, 5 April 2025 (UTC)