Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Archive 8

Coords on top as extra option ? (again)

In the millionth article Jordanhill_railway_station, it seems people can't agree if the coords should be added or not :

• removing the coords is just throwing away VERY usefull information and very usefull links
• adding the coords in the normal text paragraphs however doesn't look that good and is a bit over the top:

Maybe people should really reconsider adding templates for adding coords at the top of the articles , like the german/dutch/portugese wiki's ? See:

Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Geographical_coordinates#Coordinates_at_the_top_of_the_article

--LimoWreck 10:02, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

LimoWreck - my apologies: I hadn't seen your comments here before I moved the coordinates back to Notes and references again. Anyway, I actually agree with you: having them in the normal text just looks wrong. Thanks for pointing out the German and Portuguese Wikipedias' practise. Those certainly are elegant non-intrusive solutions. Perhaps we should have a straw poll to resolve this. --A bit iffy 10:58, 3 March 2006 (UTC)

I've been promoting this idea for general use at en.wikipedia for the last week, so I would definitely support this. Developer support is necessary to get the required code into Monobook.css, but broad support at the Millionth Article might be enough to make it happen! — Saxifrage ✎ 19:54, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

I forgot to mention that the CSS has been added to a couple of the style sheets this past week, so {{coor title d}}, {{coor title dm}}, and {{coor title dms}} are up and running. {{CoorHeader}} is deprecated.

--William Allen Simpson 04:58, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Hartley Bay, British Columbia

Could someone check my coordinate conversion on that page? And what is the 6000 about in the teemplate? Rmhermen 19:12, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Version 1.0 Editorial Team cooperation

Hello. I'm a member of the Version 1.0 Editorial Team, which is looking to identify quality articles in Wikipedia for future publication on CD or paper. We recently began assessing articles using these criteria, and we are are asking for your help. As you are most aware of the issues surrounding your focus area, we are wondering if you could provide us with a list of the articles that fall within the scope of your WikiProject, and that are either featured, A-class, B-class, or Good articles, with no POV or copyright problems. Do you have any recommendations? If you do, please post your suggestions at the listing of all active Places WikiProjects, and if you have any questions, ask me in the Work Via WikiProjects talk page or directly in my talk page. Thanks a lot! Titoxd^{(?!? - help us)} 18:24, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Longitude Latitude

I'm new to this whole thing, and i was finding Long Lat co-ordinates for Pilanesberg National Park, some one else was helping me, and i found that depending on where you looked, the co-ordinates were different, I eventually settled with the one on google earth, was this the right thing to do? Philc 0780 13:31, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Help needed

Please help me to arrange coors in the upper right angle of Livadia Palace, the way the do in de:Liwadija Palast. Thanks, --Ghirla ^-трёп- 10:26, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

The equivalent here to Koordinate Artikel is {{coor title dms}}.

--William Allen Simpson 12:21, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

multiple coords within an article?

Hi all, I'm new to this. The article Carnac stones deals with a lot of disparate objects for which the precise locations are, however, known [1]. Is there a way I can tag each of these objects? Or can I only tag the general location of the Carnac stones, accurate to say 20kms? Stevage 13:34, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

There is only room for one coordinate in the header; use the {{Coor title dm}} template (I think degrees+minutes works best for the size of the given region, perhaps even rounded to the nearest tens of minutes). {{Coor dms}} inserts a coordinate in the text; you can use as many as you want on a page, so this would be appropriate for the individual features. -- Eugene van der Pijll 21:35, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Since you've got decimal degrees,

{{coor d|47.617800|N|3.065|W|type:landmark}} would save you converting. That produces 47.617800°N 3.065°W / 47.617800; -3.065. If there are going to be a lot of links on a page, it'd probably look better if you could mask it somehow. Neither an internal nor external link seems to work, but you can put it into a footnote:

—wwoods 00:38, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Well, I've tried incorporating some directly into the headings. Do you think it looks too intrusive? Carnac stones. Stevage 08:55, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

No, but I suggest cutting the 00s from the latitudes. Since they all end that way, I don't think the source is really claiming the positions are accurate to 10 cm, it's just some quirk of their system.

—wwoods 17:33, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

WikiMiniAtlas Javascript plugin

WikiMiniAtlas in action

I'd like you to point you to a little javascript extension for your monobook.js file. It displays draggable and zoomable maps in geocoded articles (with a little marker at the article coordinates). Check the instalation instructions and give it a test drive :-)

The next step will be AJAX powered insertion of clickable Wikilinks. Check out a live demo (with german wikilinks) here! --Dschwen 18:35, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

A neat idea. But why does it load so slowly? Rmhermen 21:31, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

Maybe because it is served from my crappy office desktop? If this gets more response it'll have to be hosted on a better connection, ideally on the wikimedia servers. Btw on the german WP the AJAX links are already fully working. If I get to it tomorrow i'll update the version in en:wp. --Dschwen 23:25, 19 May 2006 (UTC)

The new version is available. The map now has clickable links to geocoded articles with little markers at their geographical positions. More links appear gradually when you zoom in. The priority with which they appear is determined by the article length they refer to. --Dschwen 10:12, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Categorization of location

I have just created Wikipedia:Categorization of location, proposing a hierarchy of location-based categories. Once widely employed, these will allow the reader to quickly find articles about locations that are near that described by the article they're currently reading. All feedback welcome, as always. AxelBoldt 03:05, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

Why doesn't use: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~kolossos/georef/umkreis.php?submit=%2B&lon=-0.13333299999999&lat=51.5&rang=9.8765432098767&map=1 or http://tools.wikimedia.de/~kolossos/ajax/place-search.php  ? --de:Benutzer:Kolossos 12:10, 4 July 2006 (UTC)

Precision

Is there anything which can be done about the faux-precise locations of cities? It appears that some of the publically available sources people use for coordinates are precise to tenths of seconds of arc, which is somewhere on the order of 3m (10 ft). Unless the data is showing the City Hall (at that precision, perhaps the Mayor's private bathroom in City Hall?), or the geographic center of the municipal boundaries of the city, it seems that one minute of arc precision is all that is necessary to locate even most small villages. Perhaps tens of seconds would be required in locations where villages are small and closely spaced. Many cities are tens of minutes across in at least one dimension. Argyriou 20:22, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Some of that could be accomplished with a bot. The bot could access the pages at, say, Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Coor dms, and round off the coordinate values if the parameter "type:city" is present. But rounding off to the nearest minute might be too coarse in certain cases, for example if the coordinates point to the city hall or the city center. --Opie 22:30, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Or maybe a change could be made to the template itself, so that any pair of coordinates followed by the parameter "type:city" would automatically be rounded off. --Opie 22:34, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

Why metadata content?

I know that coordinates are extremly useful for any geographical article and this is what makes Wikipedia unique. But could you give me a rationale about why it's included as a metadata content? Why could it be included in the main text, in the lead or in an infobox? Metadata content is hard to find for the new reader, and conflicts with some other content in the same area like the little FA star or the top announcement (like the current one: Early registration for Wikimania 2006 is open until July 9. Scholarships are available; applications are due by June 28.). Thank you. CG 08:05, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

What CG didn't say is that the coor title series of templates are being discussed at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion#Template:Coor_title. --Scott Davis ^Talk 00:47, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

I posted the message before the discussion started. It was William Allen Simpson who indicated that these coordinates were part of this project. CG 17:38, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

It makes the data easier to extract and harness for other cool projects like (*cough*shameless plug*cough*) User:Dschwen/WikiMiniAtlas. And it follows the idea of the semantic web. --Dschwen 20:53, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

Celestial Navigation

Wouldn't it be nice to do a similar thing for space? One could parse the information of the Starbox template and generate script files for Celestia...--Joris Gillis 11:33, 30 June 2006 (UTC)

Here's the implementation of external resource page for celestial equatorial coordinates (M100 galaxy):

User:Friendlystar/EqCoor   {{EqCoor|12|22|54.9|+15|49|21|15|M100}}

Right ascension: 12^h 22^m 54.9^s   {{EqCoor-RA|12|22|54.9|+15|49|21|15|M100}}

Declination: +15° 49′ 21″   {{EqCoor-Dec|12|22|54.9|+15|49|21|15|M100}}

— friendlystar 16:22, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Covering an area

Hello,

I've just recently become interested in geographic coordinates, and the work you guys are doing is certainly very impressive. :)

I was just wondering how people generally handle the problem of areas such as countries and rivers, well even oceans too, most things. Representing them by a precise dot certainly seems wrong, even if the map is way "zoomed out" (so it's a very huge dot)...I read a bit here about using a "bounding box" but that still doesn't seem very precise. Is this really the best method that we've come up with to describe areas? Are there alternative (if uncommon) methods out there? I'm curious. --pfctdayelise (translate?) 06:23, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

For this purpose, generally use {{coor d}} or {{coor title d}} with no decimal near the centre of the area. The text will give an idea of the area or boundaries. --Scott Davis ^Talk 07:15, 21 July 2006 (UTC)

New location point dataset

The following is the result of taking Wikipedia's category links and the NIMA GNS data, and rubbing vigorously. With a number of quite cautious validation checks applied to both datasets, this gives an unambigious location for 12660 out of a possible 28628 (44%) articles about non-US cities, towns and villages.

The results are sorted by country, then place, and binned into four files. They have also been compared to the data in Koordinaten_en_CSV.txt, and labelled by whether they are new coordinates (NEW), or duplicate coordinates already in articles (dup), and, if so, whether they are exact duplicates, or if not, roughly how many km out they are. (The distance calculation uses several approximations, so treat it only as an order-of-magnitude figure).

• User:The Anome/Geodata 1: countries A-F
• User:The Anome/Geodata 2: countries G-I
• User:The Anome/Geodata 3: countries J-M
• User:The Anome/Geodata 4: countries N-Z

-- The Anome 17:34, 6 August 2006 (UTC) (revised 12:53, 7 August 2006 (UTC), to take into account requests below)

I would be interested in a list with cities/towns/villages where our coordinates differ form the GNS ones by more than, say, 10km; sorted by country, if possible. I'm working on Dutch villages mainly, and such a list would be a good help to correct coordinates. (If its wikipedia that is wrong. The GNS database does contain errors.) Eugène van der Pijll 19:02, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, GNS is not the cleanest dataset I've ever seen. Eugène, can you point me at a single resource where I can get the existing coordinate/article data in an easy-to-process machine-readable format? If you can, I'd be happy to crunch the numbers. -- The Anome 20:53, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/cntry_files.html has the data per country and in one single 190Mb zip-file. Eugène van der Pijll 22:27, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Rereading your message, I think you meant the wikipedia data... You may find these files useful; they were announced on here. I haven't looked at them tough. -- Eugène van der Pijll 22:32, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! That looks exactly like what I was looking for. I'll take a look... interim result: it seems that of the locations I found, 2959 are for articles with coordinates in en: already, so 9701 of the data points appear to be genuinely new. I'll post the deltas for the 2959 duplicates tomorrow. -- The Anome 02:01, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

OK, here's a dataset showing the differences: User:The Anome/Geodata differences en:GNS; and here is a dataset showing only items for which the difference is greater than 10km: User:The Anome/Geodata differences en:GNS gt. 10km. -- The Anome 11:01, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Looking at some of the more massive outliers in the error reports above suggests that there are significant errors in Koordinaten_en_CSV.txt: for example, on the Birdwood, South Australia page, Koordinaten_en_CSV.txt has

Birdwood, South Australia -34,819 -138,965 landmark

my GNS-sourced data gives

• Birdwood, South Australia 34 49 00 S 138 58 00 E

The article and Google maps both agree with my data. The other dramatic outliers in Australia also seem to be the same problem. -- The Anome 11:33, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

I'm checking the A's now. There are at least some cases where we are right and GNS (presumably) wrong; e.g. Arnia. Eugène van der Pijll 12:09, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

It looks like there was a problem with the collation of data from pages that used {{Geolinks-AUS-suburbscale}}, which Birdwood does. There are two large concentrations of places in the eastern Pacific that should be near Sydney and Adelaide, as well as a few other places from that template. --Scott Davis ^Talk 13:33, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

I've done some further spotchecking of points with large reported discrepancies (> 100km) against the existing data, (see User:The Anome/Geodata - outliers gt. 100 km) using MultiMap, Google and Yahoo! Maps. The five randomly-chosen points I've looked at so far all suggest that the GNS data is correct to within a couple of km or less from the marked map feature. This is better than I expected: but you're right, Arnia is way off. -- The Anome 14:56, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

The discrepancy in Arnia because of mistakes in matching the GNS data to wikipedia articles. There is more than one Arnia in the GNS database, and you've chosen the wrong one. The same for Ako, Hyogo. Eugène van der Pijll 15:13, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Gah! I thought I had that cracked: the heuristic I used was that the page had to be the only one of that name in the country (as found by following the category tree upwards), and that there was only one record of that name in that country in the GNS, after various other heuristics had been employed to deal with naming conventions, etc. I can have a go at tracking it down, but not until I've got some more free time. I haven't yet used the subnational region category data, which will require another level of heuristics to tie CC1 ADM1 to Wikipedia subnational regions, but I'll also give that a go next time. -- The Anome 16:47, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

Hi, at the moment I am 600 km away from my computer. Tomorow I am back and cheak this problem. In the last month I change my program. I write the complete source code new. Now I have a perl script. 99 % of error I have found, but not all. At friday I upload an new Koordinaten_en_CSV.txt, because I forget the minus in the south hemisphere. I write a new part of my script which test the both coordinates from EN and DE. The Result is interessting. Only 800 coordinates have more then 2000m difference in EN and DE. In the next week I will present a new international CSV-dataset. They include the coordinate with the articlename in eigth important languages. So everybody can produce a KML for spanish or russia wikipedia. If you find more errors or you have question, please write my. I will try my best to fix it. ;-) -- Stefan Kühn 21:12, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

That's good news, Stefan. The more we all work together, the better the results will be. Please let me know when your new, improved dataset is ready, and I'll re-run my program. In the meantime, I'll work on finding and fixing my remaining false disambiguation bugs. -- The Anome 21:31, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

I've found my bug: I was only counting standard (N) and canonical (C) names; the correct Arnia was listed as a variant (V) name, and got missed out, creating the false appearance of a unique name.-- The Anome 21:40, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

And I've found and fixed another bug: this one affected the formatting of templates places with missing-leading-zero degree, or degree-and-minute, values. I've regenerated the listings above accordingly. -- The Anome 01:12, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

Ok, I fix the error in my new script. I wrote "W" for "E", when I extract the "Mapit-AU". I hope I can upload the correct CSV-Data at Monday. The "Templeate:Mapit-AU" is very special, because the frist inside is "long=" and then "lat=". In "Templeate:Mapit-US" first "lat=" and than "long=". Ths is also the reason for some wrong using of this templeate. For example: One Tree Hill, South Australia, Uleybury, South Australia, Canberra railway station, Brampton Island, Queensland, Denistone railway station, Sydney, West Ryde railway station, Sydney, Willoughby, New South Wales. For the future we should change this order, first lat secound long! -- Stefan Kühn 08:53, 13 August 2006 (UTC)

I have upload the new version of KML and CSV. -- Stefan Kühn 08:54, 14 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, Stefan. I've regenerated my data using the new versions of your files and the latest en: Wikipedia dump, and User:The Anomebot2 is busily pushing the results into the database. -- The Anome 22:27, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Done! See Special:Contributions/The_Anomebot2 -- The Anome 22:26, 24 August 2006 (UTC)