Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Proposals/Street View

The following discussion is an archived proposal of the WikiProject below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the project's talk page (if created) or the WikiProject Council). No further edits should be made to this page.

The resulting WikiProject was not created

Description

The purpose of this project is to add external links to Wikipedia articles showing them on Google Street View.

This is applicable in articles pertaining to specific locations. It may include certain landmarks, events, or other subjects in which a specific point is key.

To add a link, simply find the location on the Google Maps site and drag the "pegman" to the location to activate Street View. Navigate and rotate the picture until you get the best possible view of the location. Click "link" on the top right and copy-paste the link into the "external links" section of the article (create one if there isn't one already).

ONLY provide a link if information on the exact location (either an address or intersection) is available from one or more sources. Do not try to guess the location or determine it through your own original research.

Participation in this project carries no obligation. No one is expected to exhaust their time adding such links. Each participant can help by introducing these types of links to the handful of applicable articles they have interest in maintaining, updating them as necessary.

Currently, Google Street View is not available in all locations, even in cities that have coverage. But new locations are constantly being added, and Google has the goal of providing the service to the whole world. Sebwite (talk) 20:20, 3 May 2009 (UTC)}}[reply]

Support

Sebwite (talk) 20:20, 3 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
TouLouse (talk) 13:48, 4 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
DGG (talk) 22:46, 15 May 2009 (UTC) Looking at the sources below, these images are extraordinarily useful. They need to be selected with care, but they add a resources that we could not do otherwise. I think its worth making an exception to whatever rules necessary in order to do them. but I must admit i am unlikely to have the time to work on it activelyDGG (talk) 03:08, 22 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

Scope is too narrow. Do we really need a separate wikiproject for this? Splette :) ^{How's my driving?} 19:33, 7 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
A task force would be better for this, though I do see some usefulness in this, as is would benefits articles without images. However, how would we ensure that the street view placements are accurate? Also, street view doesn't cover all areas, especially remote places.themaee ^talk 04:48, 9 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, hell no. We can use coordinate templates if necessary; we don't need links like this. --NE2 05:02, 14 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
While I have some sympathy for the idea of providing images to image-free articles about geographic locations, this really sounds like a dreadful idea in practice. External links sections already tend to attract, um, an abundant number of links, and this is just going to stuff more links in them. The images have characteristically low quality, poor resolution, and cropping problems. You're more likely to get an out-of-focus blob of a building or monument, with other vehicles blocking the view, on a day with lousy weather. Also, this is basically a "search results" type of link, if you think about it, This is not the kind of link that we want to encourage. It certainly should not be an entirely separate WikiProject, with all of the hassle and administrative overhead that implies. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:37, 14 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
No - WhatamIdoing has said it very well. We already have far too many links on far too many articles, and these links are not going to add much to the articles and will at times just detract - bad images, wrong images (which is really not acceptable and most people adding links probably won't even know they are wrong), etc. Dougweller (talk) 05:14, 15 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]
No, to the specific proposal, for a slightly different reason. The goal, as I see, is to allow easy access to ground level photographs that have been made systematially for many urban areas by Google and to a lesser extent its competitors. Such access is a very good thing; I have already enjoyed clicking on the coordinates in an article and seeing street maps, terrain maps, and aerial photographs. This works through Geohack, for any article that has coordinates and that's the way to handle ground truth as well. None of these various views is far more important than the others; all show the same place and teach different things about it. Google and the others provide some integration among the views, and we should merely include ground level views along with the other choices rather than put separate links for one commercial service in every article. Jim.henderson (talk) 05:34, 16 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion

Many may ask why do we need such links within articles?

These links help provide more information about the place. The enable the reader to see a photo of the place (if not already provided in the article, or if the one in the article is poor quality). They show where on the map the landmark is, and where it is in relation to other notable landmarks. And the allow the reader to see the landmark at different angles, whatever is possible given what Google has captured. These are just to name a few. Sebwite (talk) 04:20, 10 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

There can be more than one

I think this fits under WP:GEO and a to-be-created geographical information services section "views of this location" in Template:GeoTemplate. It just needs a bit more code and possibly some invisible information in articles.

On the French Wikipedia people created fr:Template:Google Street View to generate links from the view parameters instead of copying and pasting magic links. The parameters are camera coordinates, rotation, inclination and zoom, which could in theory be used with other services as well. The template also went through a deletion discussion where the result was to keep it until the functionality can be added to our coordinates tools.

If we only know the object location, like with Wikipedia articles currently, Google can still help: their API contains the GStreetviewClient.getNearestPanoramaLatLng method, which returns the coordinates of the nearest camera view they have. You can try it at their sample page by dragging the marker to an object location and see the street view change accordingly. This is not perfect of course, because there can be obstructions and the nearest camera location facing the object may be looking at something else than its facade. I suspect Google will later improve their systems to allow linking to Street View images that show the requested location, like Microsoft has done with the Bird's Eye view in Live Search.

There are also many similar local services that don't intend to be as wide scale as Google, but would still be useful to link from articles through some intermediary page that has logic to allow choice from relevant services. There's Norc for many East European cities, Seety for London, hitta.se for Stockholm, MapJack for some US and Thailand cities, Everyscape for more US, Gothere for Singapore, City8 for some Chinese cities, Kapou for Greece (suspended for now[1]), Gdeetotdom for Moscow, Daum for Seoul, Mappy for some views in France, Spain and Luxembourg, Microsoft's silly tech preview of a few US cities, perhaps iiCosmo for selected locations around the world, etc etc. (these from a quick web search for similar services)

We also have our own image repository Commons, where we can build ways to link to galleries geographically. For example, I wrote a tool once for commons:Commons:Geocoding to show geocoded images of a location ordered counter-clockwise around the object. See it with Arc de Triomphe for example. The lack of coverage and sufficient geocoding would be a problem there, of course. This just to say that these types of services are widely available and we shouldn't limit readers to just the biggest one, but try to find ways to direct people to them all. --Para (talk) 12:36, 14 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I agree the best way to go that will take the least maintenance is through linking templates. do not think there is much question that the links can be useful. The part that concerns general issues is making an exception to the non-commercial links rule;I note that all or most of the alternative sites mentioned are also commercial. The degree of commercial distraction in the images various, from seely at the less obtrusive end to Everyscape at the other. I can not see our not doing this, because the links are so enormously useful. DGG (talk) 22:44, 15 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support: "Great idea" vs "Sign me up"

I just wanted to make sure that all the supporters were actually planning to join the project, if it is created. The "support" section, which used to be called "interested Wikipedians" once upon a time, is not supposed to produce a list of people saying "somebody else should do that," because the proposer really needs to identify actual potential members in this process. If you support the general concept, but don't really see yourself joining and doing the work, then please indicate that clearly somewhere on this page. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:57, 16 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the project's talk page (if created) or at the WikiProject Council). No further edits should be made to this page.