Research data on crowd-mapping project Wikimapia: Wikimapia is a major privately-owned volunteered geographic information (VGI) project to collect information about places. Over the past ten years, Wikimapia has attracted hundreds of thousands of contributors and collected millions of data points, including towns, restaurants, lakes, and tourist attractions (http://wikimapia.org). Unlike OpenStreetMap, Wikimapia adopts a "placial" perspective, favouring rich descriptions over detailed geometries and encouraging the collection of textual and visual content about places with approximate footprints. In this article, we first trace the origin and development of Wikimapia as a for-profit project, intimately linked with search engine advertising.