Hi there! I’m Waldir, and I’m from Cape Verde. I’ve always had a certain fascination for maps, and during my teenage years, besides collecting those I could get my hands on, I actually had some fun drawing my own maps, to add details that were missing from the few maps of Cape Verde that were available to the public. If you’d like to see what that looked like, here are some pictures.

After I found Wikipedia, I immediately loved the wiki concept, and started contributing in 2005. Soon afterwards, I heard of OpenStreetMap, and in late 2006 I made my first edit. However, it took me a while to start contributing more regularly, because I’ve been living in Portugal since 2004 and at the time there were no digital street maps of Cape Verdean cities available (so no GPS traces were available, evidently: who would use GPS navigation in a country without roadmap coverage?), and satellite coverage was very poor.

When Bing generusly offered worldwide high-definition aerial imagery, including Cape Verde, I finally was able to start editing more, and since then I’ve been mostly focusing in improving the detail of the map of the Murdeira village, where my home is in Cape Verde. Thanks to the help of friends and family, and a generous donation of a detailed map by Turim, OSM’s Murdeira map is currently the most comprehensive and detailed online map of Murdeira available anywhere — check for yourself!

I keep some progress notes and other useful information in my userpage on the OSM wiki.