Those maps on Wikipedia

[rudeboyskunk]

Ok, I've searched all over Wikipedia, MediaWiki, WikiMedia Commons, etc etc, basically all throughout the WikiMedia Foundation to figure out how to make the maps used on Wikipedia (just the ones with all gray countries and then some random ones will be highlighted with different colors). They provide the blank maps and guides on how to use the colors, but how am I supposed to fill in an entire country, islands and all, using just Inkscape (for the SVGs) or the GIMP (for the PNGs)? Anybody have any ideas?

[ssam]

if you look at the info page on one of those maps there is a lot of information
eg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gl...pean_Union.svg
seems it was made with Generic Mapping Tools http://gmt.soest.hawaii.edu/

also there is this
http://extensions.services.openoffic...p-professional