Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Archive 22

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ParserFunction Expr.php will soon correctly handle unicode minus

Hi!

MOS requires a unicode minus (U-2212) to represent a minus or subtraction operator for display. But if a template tries to evaluate that expression, parser functions #expr and #ifexpr break (bugzilla 15349). This new commit fixes that. It should be live in English wp in about a week, I don't know about others.

Didn't know if you guys were interested. Enjoy. Saintrain (talk) 00:19, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know.

While I can see the advantage from a typographic viewpoint, most software is still Unicode-unaware, and using Unicode minus signs will break all sorts of tools that only understand HYPHEN-MINUS when parsing numbers, including dump-parser code used for geodata maintenance. If we're not careful, we will end up propagating bad data through the system, regexes and number-parsing routines in most external tools will fail and negative numbers will be either ignored, or worse, turn into positive numbers.

Have the Kolossus team and Google's representatives been told about this? -- The Anome (talk) 08:40, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Update: see User:The Anome/Unicode coord test for a test case; currently the top two test cases are completely broken because the changes above have not yet been applied. It'll be interesting to see what happens as the software evolves.

However, the following test case does work, but currently breaks the Geohack page on the toolserver:

Here's a direct URL for the geohack page, using HYPHEN-MINUS in the usual way -- note that the minus sign turns 1° N into 1° S:

http://stable.toolserver.org/geohack/geohack.php?params=-1_N_1_E_

Here's the same thing using MINUS SIGN, which would happen if data was entered into a template using this convention -- the toolserver page ignores the minus sign:

http://stable.toolserver.org/geohack/geohack.php?params=-1_N_1_E_

I think a lot more testing is needed throughout the entire geodata ecosystem before we consider going live with this. I know all my current tools will break -- the fixes are trivial, but I will need to apply them to all of the tools, and then re-test them all. As the current single largest producer of Wikipedia geodata, I certainly won't be outputting templates with MINUS SIGNs embedded until I'm confident all significant downstream consumers can parse it correctly.

Perhaps the creation of "ASCII-number" and "Unicode-number" parser functions that perform the obvious textual transformations their names imply might help this transition? -- The Anome (talk) 10:00, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

I think the geohack, wikiminiatlas etc are brilliant and would be very disappointed were any of them to break. I think the distinction between minus and hyphen is silly "what colour would you paint the wheel" nattering. I am not advocating nor encouraging a switch to minus.

But if someone else does follow the MOS and use a minus, at least parts of the chain won't break anymore. I thought that knowing that #expr won't choke on a minus anymore would make things easier. One less thing to worry about. Sorry. Saintrain (talk) 15:33, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I agree, this feels very much like "painting the wheel": please don't take any of this as a criticism of you personally; I can see that you're just trying to stop things breaking, rather than pushing for incompatible changes. -- The Anome (talk) 07:26, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

WikiMiniAtlas should now be prepared for a possible introduction of MINUS SIGN. --Dschwen 15:46, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Related note: User:Werson, who often fixes MOS related issues in articles, requested the display of the minus sign instead of the hyphen at Template talk:Coord#Minus sign. We could still make the templates display negative numbers with the proper minus once MediaWiki can process the character, but limit coordinate entry to the character on most keyboards. That way only the screen scraping tools would need fixing. --Para (talk) 14:44, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Help please!

I've tried to put the following co-ords with the nice globe thingy at the top left hand side of Larmer Tree Gardens, but Captain Cockup is at home today. I've tried following the instructions in the MOS but to no avail. Could anyone help out please? Co-ords are 50 deg, 57 mins, 06.82 secs N; 2 deg, 04 mins 59.86 secs W. Thanks. Roisterdoister (talk) 14:22, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I meant to ask - can we link to Google Earth images? Is that allowed? Roisterdoister (talk) 14:24, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

I've added a coord for the place - best that you check it by clicking on the link at the top. The Mapserver provides a link to Google earth, so "no" is the short answer to your question, for the reason that a link is already provided ... we do not single out single map sources on the article page.

Any analysis of which part didn't work for you would be handy: we know that the documentation is not the best, and knowing where it went wrong for you would help us improve matters. Maybe. --Tagishsimon (talk) 14:53, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Thank-you, that was quick! I've checked and it's perfect. Didn't realise about the Mapserver thing linking to Goggle Earth, dur. My failed attempt is here: [1]. I probably did something really stupid ... Roisterdoister (talk) 15:01, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

You used coor title dm and then supplied it with second parameters, which would probably have worked with coor title dms (note the last s). But we're playing coord games and deprecating coor * nowadays in any event. Glad it's all sorted out. --Tagishsimon (talk) 16:18, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Toolserver not responding

• The toolserver seems to be offline. Do you know a place to report this "bug" ? Is it on bugzilla ? Teofilo talk 05:17, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Tagging potentially geolocatable places without coordinates

The German-language Wikipedia has an interesting feature: article marked with {{Coordinate}}, but without actual coordinates, now generate a message saying "Koordinaten fehlen! Hilf mit." (English: "Coordinates missing. Help with this.") in the article header, at the same place that the coordinates would be if the coordinates were present. See http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Puding&oldid=49699751 for an example.

If we were to implement similar functionality in {{coord}}, we could greatly advance progress towards completeness in geotagging articles. For example, an article about a town in Mexico could be tagged as {{coord|region:MX_type:city|display=title|country=Mexico}}. This could then both display the notice in the top right corner of the page, and put the article into a hidden category, something like Category:Places in Mexico without location data or Category:Mexico articles without location data.

To see how many articles could be tagged in this way, I've now generated a list of 56744 place articles that appear to be eligible for coding, but that I cannot yet automatically generate coordinates for, and have not yet been scanned by User:The Anomebot2. After checking a small sample of these using the bot, I have found that 39 of the 75 articles in the random sample are currently lacking geodata. Extrapolating this over the entire dataset would suggest that there are roughly 29000 articles that could be automatically tagged for geolocation by other means.

Does anyone think this would be a good idea? If so, I can easily start tagging these. -- The Anome (talk) 18:09, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

That's an interesting suggestion. {{No geolocation}} does something similar, but at the foot of the article. If {{coord}} is deployed without coordinates, then it is important that class="geo" is not present, otherwise a broken Geo microformat would be emitted. We'd also have to make sure that the additional code didn't significantly reduce the number of instances which can be used on one page. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 18:21, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, and yes.

See User:The Anome/articles missing coordinates by country for a breakdown by contry of the number of articles in the un-scanned list. -- The Anome (talk) 18:23, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

An idea: how about having a {{coord missing}} template to do this? It could take country name and location type parameters, allowing for fine-grained categorization. For example, Skomrak could be tagged with {{coord missing|country=Norway|type=Populated place}}. This would also not overload the {{coord}} template still further. -- The Anome (talk) 18:46, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

That seems eminently sensible; it would be easy to manually remove the string "missing" , and patently obvious that that should be done. It would also deprecate {{No geolocation}} and similar templates. And it would avoid distorting counts of successful {{Coord}} implementations. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 19:04, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

I've now removed every use of {{No geolocation}}, which was only used in six articles. We should now move to delete that template. -- The Anome (talk) 23:53, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Agreed (though, for the record, the low usage was because it is used short-term, and removed when editors add coordinates). See also {{LocateMe}}, {{LocateMeLong}}, {{LocateMeText}} and {{LocateMeBot}}. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:57, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

I've already replaced the occurrences of {{no geolocation}} with {{locate me}} notices on the respective articles' talk pages, so nothing should be lost. -- The Anome (talk) 00:02, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

I support The Anome's suggestion. Btw, there were uses of {{LocateMeText}} in three articles, which I replaced with coordinates. Spencer^T?C 21:33, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

{{LocateMeLong}} and {{LocateMeBot}} are used on talks of one article each. Spencer^T?C 21:40, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

{{LocateMeLong}} has slightly different function, in that it asks for a series of coordinates for a linear feature; like those on Tame Valley Canal. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:05, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

I've changed the single instance of {{LocateMeBot}} to {{LocateMeLong}}, which is more appropriate for the article concerned. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:08, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Great. In the interests of limiting template proliferation, do we have consensus to deprecate no-longer-used {{LocateMeBot}}, {{LocateMeText}} and {{no geolocation}} templates? This will leave {{locate me}} (on talk pages), {{LocateMeLong}} (at the bottom of articles) and the forthcoming {{coord missing}} (to be displayed in the same place as display=title coords) as the current set of missing-coordinate templates. -- The Anome (talk) 22:24, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

OK by me; in fact, I'd go further, and change all instances of {{locate me}} to {{coord missing}}, too. Can we use the new template, yet? If not, please let us know when it's ready. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:45, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Eventually, yes. But please don't use the new tag yet. I'd like to proceed slowly, to make sure that there's sufficient consensus for this before we start, and that every part of the system has been checked out in advance, so it doesn't go off half-cocked when deployed.

I suggest that we first get everything right, then perform a small experimental run of about 100 templates, then ask for comment from the community. If that's OK, we can then go ahead with adding these tags to large numbers of articles: as I say, I think we can add around 29,000 such tags at that point.

Things we currently need to resolve include:

• What should the tag message be?
• What should be the naming convention for the hidden templates added by the bot?
• What should the "landing page" for the "you can help" part of the tag look like?
• What parameters should the template take? I suggest just one, "country".

Please take a look at User:The Anome/coord missing test for an example of usage. -- The Anome (talk) 23:00, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

All agreed; it looks good, but lacks the yellow "highlighting" used on the WP-DE example you gave in your first post. My preference would be for something even more eye-catching. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:04, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

To answer your points in order, I suggest:

• "Coordinates needed; please add them."
• {{Coord missing/hidden}}? {{Coord missing/sub}}? some other in that format?
• Just use a link to Wikipedia:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Geographical coordinates
• Just "country" seems OK to me. Prose, or ISO codes?

I've taken the liberty of adding to the template documentation.

Postscript: Perhaps additional parameters could be allowed, but ignored, allowing simple addition of latitude & longitude values when converting to {{coord}} ? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:17, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

I've incorporated some of the changes above. See User:The Anome/coord missing test for what it looks like. Please feel free to change it some more. Remember that this tag is intended to appear in tens of thousands of articles, so it needs to look polished, like a natural part of the UI. -- The Anome (talk) 23:27, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Thank you; I have done, and am through for tonight. Good working with you! Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:43, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

I left some comments about the template at Template talk:Coord missing. Spencer^T?C 13:07, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm confused. What do I use? =Nichalp «Talk»= 17:16, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Nothing just yet... it's not yet ready. Wait a couple more days, and we'll have it finalized, ready for a test run. -- The Anome (talk) 17:30, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Infobox Protected area coordinates broken

Unresolved

I have recently fixed a couple if instances of {{Infobox Protected area}}, (example) where the display was horribly broken because no seconds had been entered in the coordinates. The only way to resolve the problem in the short term was to add zero seconds, but this is obviously not an optimal solution.

I reported the problem on its talk page over two weeks ago, but no-one has responded. Can someone with better template coding skills than I fix it, please? Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 07:19, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

This might be related: Template talk:Infobox nrhp#Coord transform broken. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 19:52, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Still happening. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 19:40, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

Query

This talk page has 2 sets of overlapping coords in its title bar. Is this so Google earth will be able to pin it down (with 2 pins)? Occuli (talk) 14:33, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Google doesn't include talk pages in its mapping. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 15:06, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Broken geotags

I'd greatly appreciate some help fixing the geotags listed in User:The Anome/malformed geotag candidates: these should be the only current blockers to the next phase of geotag tidying by the bot. -- The Anome (talk) 22:20, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Note: they're all done now. Thanks to everyone who participated in fixing these. -- The Anome (talk) 09:56, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Template: Coordinate TfD

I have nominated {{Coordinate}} for deletion. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 19:23, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

Bot news

User:The Anomebot2 has now finished the first run of converting roughly ~25,000 {{coor title *}} templates added by my bot. I'm now working through converting a second list of ~35,000 other similar, syntactically correct, tags identified by parsing the most recent dump file that were not addressed by the first run. This has also produced a list of ~2,000 tags which are syntactically invalid in various ways, which are now awaiting triage into groups for later processing. -- The Anome (talk) 11:32, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

...and in doing so, I've discovered a whole new class of errors, such as that in Queensbury, New_Brunswick, where longitude has both been labelled as "W" and also as a negative number, the resulting double negative thus putting it in the wrong side of the prime meridian; in this case, in the middle of Kazakhstan.

See User:The Anome/Geodata errors/Negative West for more. -- The Anome (talk) 11:38, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

All "Negative West" fixed. Do we have any "Negative South" errors? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 14:14, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! No, we don't have any "Negative South" errors; I checked. -- The Anome (talk) 17:26, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

To simplify things, I converted most uses of {{CoorHeader}} to {{Coord}}. -- User:Docu

{{CoorHeader}} has no uses left in articles...should we delete this? Spencer^T♦C 01:43, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Please see #CoorHeader and coor d* below. -- User:Docu

Category:Coord template needing repair

I've cleaned out all the easy-to-fix articles in Category:Coord template needing repair. At this moment there are 35 pages left. New articles appear regularly (2 per hour?) thanks to Anomebot2. The pages remaining fall into one of three classes:

1. test or prototype pages in user space
2. dense lists of towns, villages, etc. (mostly in Scandinavia)
3. WP:GEO abuse and demonstrations

Should user space pages be cleaned up? Anyone care to create a smart script to clean up the list articles? —EncMstr (talk) 18:48, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks to Wwoods for helping out! There are only user space and WP:GEO talk pages left. Thirteen total! (If anyone else helped, thanks to you too!) —EncMstr (talk) 21:07, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

That would be me ;-) I've also used "nowiki" on some user/talk pages. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:27, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

I've just fixed another couple of dozen, so it's worth taking a peek at the category from time to time, at least while the bot's still slogging away, Also, please note that in some cases the coordinates are repeated, in plain text, in the article and need to be replaced with display="inline,title". Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 20:04, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

The bot is currently idle, after replacing ~60,000 {{coor title *}} tags, at a rate of about 1000 per hour. I'll take a look at the broken cases, and try to prevent these sorts of errors from recurring. Am I right in thinking that the most common error is the "seconds = 60" case, most probably caused by poor roundoff handling in the mapping software that initially produced the data inserted into the article? -- The Anome (talk) 08:47, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but there were other errors (I found one with minutes of "378" or some such!). Thanks again for your sterling work; do you fancy a crack at coor at *? If not, there are plenty of templates needing {{Start date}}s ;-) Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 12:43, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Also a couple with the wrong seperators: "coord|12_34_56|N|01_02_03|W|". Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 20:51, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

{{coor title *}} isn't anywhere near finished yet: tens of thousands remain that were not caught by the earlier dump-based scans; I'm scanning the live database for the rest, starting off with {{coor title d}}. Then it will be time to start auto-fixing the simpler syntactically broken cases, and finally on to hand-fixing the remaining cases. Once that's done, I can move on to doing the same thing all over again for "coor at *". I expect the whole process will take weeks. -- The Anome (talk) 13:26, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. There's some discussion at Template talk:Coor dms which may also be of interest. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 14:02, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Update: I've now finished a second bot pass on "coor title d": the remaining entries in Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Coor_title_d should all be either special cases the bot is currently programmed to ignore, or generated by templates. Can someone please find and fix the few templates involved, so that they use {{coord}}, so that the few remaining literal uses of "coor title d" are exposed? We will have to do this with each of the various "coor" versions, but this is at least a start on the process. -- The Anome (talk) 16:37, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

I've tried, but this one has me stumped. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 16:52, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

I've fixed it, at least judging by the few examples I've spot-checked. -- The Anome (talk) 17:14, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

So you have, thank you. Oddly, Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Coor_title_d still includes pages using templates I changed, from another computer, about an hour ago. Is there a lag with such "special" a pages and/ or template inclusions? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 18:16, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes. Such changes are put on the "job queue" for later execution. The changes will ripple through eventually. -- The Anome (talk) 20:42, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Right, In that case, I think I've now cleared everything, other than a few user- and talk pages, We won't know, though, until the template changes are taken into account. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:26, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

I've found some you missed (or ignored?), which had extra spaces (shown here as hashes) "coor title #d|" or "coor title d#|"; and another with underscores: "coor_title_d". Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 19:45, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Update: it looks as though all instances of coor title d are now on talk pages, aprt from recent conversions [2] [3] by Docu (talk · contribs). I propose that this template now be replaced with a warning notice. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 17:25, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

I fat-fingered a coord addition here which omits the pipe between latitude and longitude. GeoHack doesn't parse the intended coordinate, and the page display is messed up. Shouldn't the template's error checking catch this awful coordinate formatting, and place the page in the screwed-up coord category?

When copying and pasting the title text to document this, it had noticed the error! The text is:

[show location on an interactive map] <span class="geo-dms" title="Maps, aerial photos, and other data for -167°-48′-38″S Expression error: Unexpected < operator°Expression error: Unexpected < operator′Expression error: Unexpected < operator″Expression error: Unrecognised word "type"">-167°-48′-38″S Expression error: Unexpected < operator°Expression error: Unexpected < operator′Expression error: Unexpected < operator″Expression error: Unrecognised word "type" / 43.709883-124.100728, type:landmark_region:US-OR_source:googlemapssatellite

Is this a different error detection mechanism than the one categorizing too many parameters, etc.? —EncMstr (talk) 06:05, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Documentation of deprecated templates

A few hours ago, I removed documentation of deprecated templates. More recently, Docu (talk · contribs) added a table documenting those templates, plus another, Coordinate, which is not used on WP-EN and is recently nominated for deletion, with consensus appearing to support that - in fact, only Docu has spoken against it. Since one of the reasons for deprecating the nine redundant templates was to simplify things for editors, I removed the table, which I feel (especially in the light of his other edits on the subject, is bordering WP:POINT. He almost immediately re-added it, with the edit summary "please use talk to explain, if you feel there is problem", despite not having done so himself. Given that the templates referred to are deprecated, are currently being replaced, and are likely candidates for blanking, deletion or redirect, how does this table help editors; or help to improve Wikipedia? Is there consensus to remove it again? (I also note that, as it stands, the template is incomplete and misleading, despite complaints about partial inclusions when he placed an earlier version on this talk page.) Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 11:03, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

The table added at WP:GEO#Comparison_of_Coordinates_entry_methods documents various methods of to enter coordinates in Wikipedia, past and present. As such, it's important to this project.

BTW Pigsonthewing's qualification of "deprecated templates" is misleading, as not all methods use templates, nor are all of them "deprecated". -- User:Docu (signature added per [4]: Docu (talk · contribs))

Yes, they're not all deprecated: you also included plain-text entry and a single non-deprecated template which is not used on WP-EN and which is about to be deleted, as I made clear above; and the current consensus-preferred template which is already well documented. Documenting historical templates is of no importance to this project; not least as they are already documented on their own pages (until such time as they're finally removed). Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 11:59, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

There is no need for a lengthy table on the main page documenting the history of coords (some never implemented) on Wikipedia. By all means create a subpage for the benefit of specialists on this topic. Occuli (talk) 12:29, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

It's even more unhelpful, now that the TfD for Coordinate has been closed as "delete". Anyone else want to comment, before I remove the table from the article? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:11, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

There doesn't appear to be any support for complete removal, thus let's just leave it there. -- User:Docu

On the contrary, you seem to be the only person in favour of keeping it. Perhaps you missed Occuli's comment, above? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:46, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

← I wrote, above: "Anyone else want to comment, before I remove the table from the article?". No-one has commented, much less objected, so I'm removing it. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 10:02, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Docu has now reverted me, with the somewhat bizarre edit summary,"please link related discussion" . Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 16:24, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

I ask again: does anyone else want to keep this? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 09:38, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

No - it is gratuitous. Occuli (talk) 09:46, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

It would be useful to keep it, as a summary of what the problems with the old methods were and what the virtues of the new methods are; but it is true that it is large, not relevant most of the time and kind of obtrusive. Perhaps retain it on a subpage of the wikiproject, so that it is still there to be referred to if necessary but it is discreetly out of the way? --VinceBowdren (talk) 10:02, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

The subpage plan seems an admirable compromise. Occuli (talk) 10:07, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

OK, I'm removing it again. If someone want to make a sub or user-space page, that's up to them. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 19:59, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

More bot news

A reasonably conservative scan of the most recent dump showed ~54000 articles containing syntactically well-formed literal {{coor d/dm/dms}} tags. These pages will be processed during the next series of bot runs. As with the previous runs, the numerical values and tag-parts of these geotags will be left as-is for the time being.

Once all this is done, I'll then be able to move on to analyze and clean up the remaining syntatically-broken cases, and then to start work on regularizing the various kinds of minor formatting and round-off fencepost errors.

This will then leave all geodata either in the format of well-formed {{coord}} tags, or in infoboxes. See User:The Anome/Infobox audit for a (somewhat out-of-date) preview of the next stage... -- The Anome (talk) 22:43, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

{{coor title dms}} is mostly done. The remaining ones in article namespace should be done manually. -- User:Docu

Anome, is it OK to edit that page? I plan to replace and/or TfD some of those templates, and would like to strike them through. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 17:29, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, please do. The page was auto-generated from a dump scan, and can be regenerated again at some later point if we ever need it again. -- The Anome (talk) 22:14, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

I'll work on manually switching them. Good job, Spencer^T♦C 01:39, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Take care with the ones the bot avoided, they are sometimes malformed in odd ways. -- User:Docu

Thank you. I've removed several which had already been deleted; or were redirected. I've also nominated several for deletion (see 28th & 29th September); once they're gone (or kept, though most seem almost WP:SNOWBALL candidates). Once they're gone, it might be worth re-running the job. Note also that I identified a couple of false positives (moved to the foot of the page) and one set of lunar coordinates. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 10:48, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

The main ones still to convert appear to be the ones in U.S. cities, with the broken "city" parameter (see WT:GEO#Coordinates_in_US_cities_articles:_where_to_display). -- User:Docu

For now, it skipped all pages that us {{mapit-US-cityscale}}. -- User:Docu

CoorHeader and coor d*

I've now removed the two last article-space uses of {{CoorHeader}} by hand. Can I now assume that there is consensus to put that template up for deletion? -- The Anome (talk) 00:02, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

At Template_talk:Coor_dms there was a discussion what to do with {{coor dms}}. To some extent the question is similar for all frequently used templates we are replacing. There are essentially four options:

1. We keep the templates in their current format. New uses in article namespace would regularly be replaced with {{coord}}. The update by bot would indicate that there is new template to be used. This keeps templates in 3 years of archived versions of the pages working. Template documentation already indicates that the template to use now is {{coord}}. This makes it easy for people to keep adding formatted coordinates. This solution has been adopted for {{coor}} some time ago. (no change/search-replace)

2. We edit the templates to display a warning with the new format to use. This indicates to editors what to do. Editors would see directly which templates to use and how. We can either do this in addition to displaying the coordinates or instead of displaying coordinates. (display warning)

3. We redirect these templates where possible or modify them to call {{coord}}. New uses in article namespace would periodically be replaced with {{coord}}. Article history version would keep working. (redirect/search-replace)

4. We delete them. This breaks all current uses in namespaces other than article namespace and displays red links in versions displayed from article histories. (delete/break history).

Personally, I think it's an advantage to have history version of the articles still more or less working. Thus, I'd avoid (4). The problem with (3) is that it could be somewhat confusing to users. Even if a template is redirected, I'd avoid coordinates being added through a redirect rather than {{coord}} directly. Personally I'd go with (1) or (2). The conversion we might need to do with options (1) or (3) shouldn't be too time consuming, but would simplify it for users to keep adding formatted coordinates. -- User:Docu

"2" is my preferred option, though in the case of coor d*, the templates should be redirected to {{coord}}, give our users the benefits of {{coord}} immediately (including the emitted microformat and the choice of display format); the change to the display warning can then be made after all instances have been converted. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 17:17, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

In my opinion, a large warning box is not acceptable. We should be putting our readers in the first place; warnings that are not useful for the average reader should not be added to articles, even if they would be useful for editors. Keeping the template intact, but adding a category (Category:Coor d* templates needing conversion) would be good; it helps the bot to find these cases, and is not too in-your-face for our readers. -- Eugène van der Pijll (talk) 09:13, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

I don't think anyone was proposing a large warning box. A slim message like that used when a template is up for deletion should suffice. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 11:29, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

That's good to hear. In that case I would prefer a (short) message in the title bar, comparable to the output of {{coord missing}} (but including the coordinates, of course). By the way, your idea of redirecting first and then reverting after most templates have been converted is a good one. -- Eugène van der Pijll (talk) 13:53, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Thank you. There are articles with multiple instances of coor d* in the running text; placing a message in the title bar for each of them would cause a collision; and even for a single instance, would place the message in a different place to the rendition of the template, where it might be missed by the editor using it. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 16:42, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

I like Eugène's idea of adding a hidden category to uses of deprecated templates. We can afford to take our time with this process; there's no need to rush for immediate deletion. More dramatic measures such as warning messages can be taken much later, well after all uses of the template have finally been removed. -- The Anome (talk) 10:53, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Do you have a view on redirecting the three coor d* templates? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 11:19, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

I'd prefer to do an automated bot run to replace (nearly) all of them with coord, work on hand-fixing the rest, then take a look at redirecting the template later. -- The Anome (talk) 12:34, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, but why not redirect in the short term (since the format is synonymous, then do a bot run, then change them to emit a warning notice, or whatever? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 15:48, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Rounding

Question: In the article Geography of Japan, the template reads coord|35|41|N|139|46|E. The coordinates displayed at the top of the page are 36 N, 138 E. Is this rounding correct? Fg2 (talk) 12:25, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

There is more than one instance of {{coord}} on that page; the one generating the "title" coordinates is:

{{coord|36|N|138|E|region:JP_type:country|display=title}}

Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 12:29, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, I just figured that out. Which one has the correct coordinates? Fg2 (talk) 12:32, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

It's now down to one set. At least there are no contradictory templates. Thanks Fg2 (talk) 13:02, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

For something as large as Japan, having minutes in the coords seems overprecise, unless it's the location of something more specific than the middle of the country.

—WWoods (talk) 16:02, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

I agree. Fg2 (talk) 23:02, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

Coordinates - Six degrees

Six degrees of freedom is needed if somebody wants to do photo overlaying, see PhotoOverlays for everyone, using built-in controls. I just thought I'd through this out there. — Dispenser 12:52, 29 September 2008 (UTC)

I don't think it's a high priority for articles. Let's get two degrees of freedom right first: it's hard enough doing point features at ground level, and we don't even deal properly with linear features like rivers and roads yet.

However, detailed position/orientation/focus might be useful for image metadata, in which case it belongs in the metadata for the image itself, rather than in the article. Ideally, to do a really professional job, lens geometry and distortion information would also be included. Is there an EXIF extension for this, actual or proposed? -- The Anome (talk) 13:55, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, there are. —EncMstr (talk) 15:28, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

A subset is already dealt with by templates on Wikimedia commons, which might be a better place (in terms of finding people with the right knowledge) to discuss such issues. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 15:33, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

This discussion belongs to Commons:Geocoding! Check out commons:user:DschwenBot. That bot goes throug new uploads, extracts gps exif data, and tags images. And no, gps exif data does not show up correctly in mediawiki by itself due to a fundamental bug in mediawiki's exif data processing. --Dschwen 16:41, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

More deprecated templates for replacement

The templates:

• {{Geolinks-cityscale}}
• {{Geolinks-US-hoodscale}}
• {{Mapit-US-cityscale}}

have been deprecated for some time. Please see my bot request for their replacement by {{coord}}. The other templates in that family have yet to be marked as deprecated. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 19:33, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

tl|Location map

There is {{Location map}} which contains, but does not necessarily display, coordinates. This is relevant to {{coord missing}} - eg Hyde Park, South Yorkshire was tagged 'coord missing' but had coords in the location map (and now has duplication as I added coord). Occuli (talk) 14:51, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Data-mining {{location map}} put on the list... -- The Anome (talk) 23:48, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

What list? -- SEWilco (talk) 02:11, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

You can use CatScan to locate them .. e.g. CatScan: Articles missing geocoordinate data by country (currently 83). -- Oct 4, 2008 -- User:Docu

Coordinates for linear features

I have started a sub-page, to give guidance on adding coordinates to articles about linear features. I intend to use it to document current practise, and develop polices for future use. Please feel free to add to it, or to discuss the matter on its talk page. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:15, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

{{Coord missing}} update

With Andy Mabbett's help, I've added another 35000 items to the {{coord missing}} queue today. See my talk page for more details; if anyone else can help find suitable matching criteria, I'd be very grateful. Extrapolating from the stats so far from my current bot run, it looks like more than 110,000 articles should have been tagged with {{coord missing}} by the end of the run. -- The Anome (talk) 13:43, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Coordinates to fix

From Dispenser's log, there are series of coordinates at WP:GEO/coordinates to fix, I haven't fixed yet. -- User:Docu

GeoHack biffed?

Resolved

Is anyone else having trouble with GeoHack? See 12.34°N 56.78°E / 12.34; 56.78. I'm seeing a page of unicode gibberish with no useful content. I don't see any recent changes to Template:GeoTemplate. —EncMstr (talk) 16:28, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm getting it too.--Knulclunk (talk) 16:34, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Looks OK to me. No template edits recently either. -- SEWilco (talk) 20:21, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

I got pages of gibberish earlier today with both Opera and Firefox but it seems to have recovered. Occuli (talk) 20:33, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Looks okay to me now. Does anyone know what happened? —EncMstr (talk) 21:10, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

No Geo Points found?

I'm cross-posting this message I posted a couple of days ago at Template talk:GeoGroupTemplate#No Geo Points found? hoping that someone here may have an answer. --Sanfranman59 (talk) 02:14, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

When I click the "Export microformated coordinates as GeoRSS" at List of Registered Historic Places in Contra Costa County, California, it returns "No Geo Points found". I know I've done this before with other Registered Historic Places lists. The "Export points of interest as KML" link works, but when I use it, it doesn't retain the name labels for each location when I import the coordinates into Google Maps. Any guidance is appreciated. --Sanfranman59 (talk) 19:00, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

I see no structure difference between Contra Costa and National Register of Historic Places listings in California, yet the latter works okay. Probably it's something that http://suda.co.uk/projects/microformats/geo/get-geo.php is sensitive to. Ack! I just tried it again and now the latter gives "No Geo Points found" too! And for the third try.... suda.co.uk is now dead.  :-( —EncMstr (talk) 17:04, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Lunar coordinates

Several articles (e.g. Ranger 4) use coor * or {{coord}} templates for lunar coordinates. As the "body globe" parameter is, as yet, not implemented, what should be done with them? Should we use {{coord}} anyway, and, if so, with what parameters? Should we have a lunar coord template, as an interim measure? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 10:19, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

If we go with "lunar coord", we would presumably also need "martian coord", "venusian coord" and so on, leading to a large number of very similar templates.

We could simplify this by defining a single "spacecoord" template, with a "globe" parameter to identify the body, that would otherwise be identical to "coord". If we have this, then we could define things like "lunar coord" as templates that invoke "spacecoord" appropriately.

Whatever we do, we should definitely not use any of the templates used for terrestrial coordinates, nor should we use that template to generate geohack links until an off-earth version of geohack (with a different base URL, please!) can deal properly with extraterrestrial coordinates using the "globe:" parameter, not should we use it to generate any microformat metadata, until a public microformat has been defined that can handle extraterrestrial bodies. -- The Anome (talk) 11:36, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

I agree with all those points. I proposed an extension of the Geo microformat for non-terrestrial coordinates over two years ago; it's now dependent on the sloth-like microformats cabal to act; though they might wait until the vCard body adopt my similar proposal in (or as an extension to) vCard 4. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 11:59, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

On reflection, it would be possible for such a template to link directly to Google Moon for Lunar coordinates; and for Martian coordinates to Google Mars, as an interim measure. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 12:24, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

The documentation on {{coord}} led me to believe it was already supported with the globe:moon attribute. What's wrong with using that? Surely you're not advocating another herd of templates! —EncMstr (talk) 15:54, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

As I said above (though wrongly referring to "body", not "globe"), the parameter is not yet implemented. I also suggested one new template; as an interim measure, Hardly a "herd". Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 16:12, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

So all it needs is a "little work" on GeoHack, right? Where's the source? I'll take a look. —EncMstr (talk) 16:16, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

User:Kolossos and others from the German Wikipedia have been playing with Template:SkyTemplate, SkyHack (source), Template:MoonTemplate, and MoonHack (source). All this is related to de:Portal:Astronomie/Wikisky&Googlesky, where the discussion page contains many further details. Indeed, why limit to globes only... --Para (talk) 16:49, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

See here for a Google Translate machine translation of the above. -- The Anome (talk) 11:05, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, We need to be careful not to conflate that effort, relating to the sky as viewed from a point on Earth at a given time; with the issue I raised above, about fixed points on bodies other than Earth, such as lunar craters or the location of Martian landers; and which seems to be addressed in part by {{MoonTemplate}}. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 11:29, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

Missing coords, but the structure no longer exists

Pasco-Kennewick Bridge (1922) was demolished... are we to put the coordinates of its former location there? Thanks. howcheng {chat} 04:44, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Yup. --Tagishsimon (talk) 06:52, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Location of things which have gone are even more important than those of things that still exist, IMHO Talltim (talk) 09:01, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Coor title d*, coor at d*

The templates {{coor title d}}, {{coor title dm}}, {{coor title dms}}, {{coor at d}}, {{coor at dm}}, and {{coor at dms}} have been removed from articles. Maybe it's time to change the documentation, removing the explanation of how to format them and simply saying to use {{coord}} with |display=title or |display=title,inline, as appropriate?
—WWoods (talk) 15:29, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 18:12, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

{{coord missing}}

At long last, {{coord missing}} and Category:Articles missing geocoordinate data by country are now live, with about 3000 articles now tagged -- see Category:Japan articles missing geocoordinate data for an example. Based on current progress, I expect to be able to tag 50,000+ articles with {{coord missing}}, categorized by country. -- The Anome (talk) 21:45, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

Would it be OK to use "United States (Georgia)" in the country parameter, when someone has identified the state? It's kind of awkward to find things near where I'll be when they're in one national group with a cast of thousands. -- SEWilco (talk) 16:58, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Please don't do it: the infrastructure to support this does not exist yet, and it's not clear what the right design should be. I hope to support something like this fairly soon, but it will take at least a week or two to think through and set up properly: when you're modifying 100,000 articles at a time, everything needs careful pre-planning.

For example, instead of using subcategories, one possibility would be for the bot to generate summary reports at intervals, populating special pages with the results. -- The Anome (talk) 18:00, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

I think the template should have both a "countryname" and "countrysubdivision" parameter. All six U.S. articles which I looked had had wikilinks to the articles for their states; a bot could use a pattern looking for a state name preceded by "[[" or ", " and followed by "]]" to find links to either state articles or links to "city, state" articles. That would subcategorize a lot of U.S. articles. It could be extended to other countries, but there is no need to recognize the subdivisions of all nations in order for the tool to be helpful. -- SEWilco (talk) 18:16, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Great, found another incantation: "[[North Dakota|ND]]". Well, even if the bot only subcategorizes 50% of articles that's still a bunch that editors won't have to manually categorize. -- SEWilco (talk) 18:22, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

I've got no problem with subcategorization in principle, but please give it time; in a few days, the remaining 63,000+ {{coord missing}} templates should have been written, fully completing the first phase of this particular subproject. Once that is done, I will then look at which countries need subcategorization, and start the process of creating suitable hidden-directory subtrees, and then work on extracting, cross-referencing and cleaning the second-level subdivision data from the dump analyzer, prior to creating and updating the necessary article templates. Interrupting the current process in order to change it at this stage is unlikely to make things go any faster.

The updated template format is likely to be {{coord missing|United States|Utah}}, where the second argument is optional (as, indeed, is the first...) which is short, simple, and backwards compatible with the existing format. -- The Anome (talk) 22:35, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

Keep in mind that you're discussing a bot which you had not mentioned nor described, while I was talking about the template and its usage. I'm not in a hurry to dig through the current pile. -- SEWilco (talk) 04:42, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

I thought, from earlier discussion, that {{coord missing}} would take its arguments in the same manner as {{coord}}, for example:

{{coord missing|type:landmark_region:GB-BIR|display=inline,title}}

so that all later editor had to do was to add the coordinate values and remove the word "missing". Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 08:07, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

That would seem preferable to me, than {{coord missing|United States|Utah}}, for the reasons stated. --Tagishsimon (talk) 08:58, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, you're right, that's a good idea. However, if we make that change, we're going to need some other mechanism in there in order to be able to group the articles into hidden categories, to help members of individual country WikiProjects to work on filling in the coordinates. (See, for example, Category:United Kingdom articles missing geocoordinate data) Ideally, I'd like to be able to group these down to second-level administrative divisions for the larger countries, so each sub-category looks small enough for clearing it out to look like a humanly-achievable goal, thus encouraging people to work on it.

One possibility might be to use a giant switch statement using the value given in the "region:" field to assign a category name; another might be an extra parameter to help generate the category name, but this would duplicate the "region:" field and tempt end-users into adding this as a parameter to other coordinate templates. A third possibility would be to use the entire parameter to create ugly-looking categories like Category:Articles missing geocoordinate data/type:landmark_region:GB-BIR or Category:Articles missing geocoordinate data/region:GB-BIR. Note that the last option would require the pre-creation of many thousands, or tens of thousands, of hidden categories, one for each possible parameter combination, in order to avoid visible categories from appearing. -- The Anome (talk) 11:48, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

By the way, the tags may already be starting to work, even in their current form: see this diff for an example. -- The Anome (talk) 11:34, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Tsk. That Jonathan Oldenbuck. He was always ahead of the curve. I guess you need to evaluate whether you're happy with the giant switch statement, or the third possibility. Adding another parameter is not ideal and should be a last resort. Clearly we're all after much the same thing: minimum of work to convert from missing to not-missing, and categories that locals can go through to find articles concerned with their locality that they can add coords to. --Tagishsimon (talk) 12:00, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

I'd welcome any alternative proposals: are there any template wizards here? -- The Anome (talk) 12:24, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

I've advertised on WP:VP/T for such a person, lest there is not one within our ranks. --Tagishsimon (talk) 12:32, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

The "type:" or "region:" stuff is non-standard Wikimedia template, and through a cursory glance through the various sub-templates, I cannot find it's use; I'm presuming this is a holding space for Wikimaps or some other feature? Last I checked, Wikimedia had not installed much in string manipulation magic words so detemining sub-cats from that string is near impossible (again, last I checked, that may have changed). Is that string used in the current coord template in any other fashion? (Knowing exactly how that is parsed or used will help determine the best course of action here). --MASEM 13:07, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

The "type" and "region" fields (and other fields within that parameter) have so far been opaque to the MediaWiki software and template code; instead they are passed out directly into the URL used for geolinking, and are then parsed out of it by the toolserver page that handles geotag URLs. Question: do we have regex support within the parser functions that could be used to parse these tags? -- The Anome (talk) 13:17, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Unfortunately, per Special:Version, there are no regex-type functions or anything like this. I'm curious as to why it was opted to put the geolinking data as a "hard" URL-encoded piece (I see that now) instead of providing a standard named tag (eg type=country vs type:country); the URL encoded piece can be built from the tags as needed. --MASEM 13:39, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

It's a hangover from the distant past of geotemplate implementation. Changing it now would be a big step. -- The Anome (talk) 16:04, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Who rubbed my lamp :D ?? Well I wouldn't call myself a template genie, but I am pretty good at templates. And no, there is currently no real support for regex matching or substring searching within the existing set of parserfunctions. Your best bet is probably to change that, as it will make your life unimaginably easier. Anyone with a bugzilla account, go vote for T8455 - if you're good at PHP, any backstage assistance would be invaluable. Other than that, as you say you're looking at creating an exhaustive list of possible values somewhere, be that in a massive switch statement (increasing page load times and parsing overhead) or in a huge category tree (very messy, will inflate pagecounts etc, huge maintenance overhead). I can't think of any clever shortcuts, unfortunately, although I've missed obvious solutions before. Happy‑melon 14:53, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

(←)There is one thing that came to mind here. First, it must be assumed that all the "type" and other parameters used for URL encoding are converted to normal MediaWiki template parameters: don't worry about order: named parameters do not count when unnamed parameters are counted, so if someone were to do {{coord|type=country|LAT|LAT}} it shouldn't break anything. Fortunately, the way the format is now, a bot can autoconvert these. That said, you can construct a template to call on the fly, so, say for the region tag, it would be possible to construct a template call that would be, something like, {{region-resolve/{{{region}}}}}, so if region were "US-CA", it would resolve to {{region-resolve/US-CA}}. Instead of having a switch case (which as noted is very ugly), you'd need X number of these "region-resolve" templates (they can be subpages to keep things clean), each containing the right category name given the region; this also can apply to all the other map data tags. Someone would just then need to create each one. The only part about this trick I don't like is that if the region parameter is not a defined template, the code "fails" silently (no text is inserted where the template is), but with smart categorization (any page using coord or coord-missing is categorized as being geocoordinated, then you can find all such pages "easily" that lack region categories, thus finding the problem in a backwards approach). If an error can be codified as to alert when there is a bad entry because it hasn't been entered yet, that would be great, but I think this approach works cleanly for what you want. Again, though, you will need to change the URL coded parameter into a set of parameters (and the only concern there is that the city's population value may have to be considered as yet a separate optional parameter). --MASEM 15:20, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

The 'missing sub-template' problem could be resolved via the ifexist function. Something like, {{#ifexist: region-resolve/{{{region}}} | {{region-resolve/{{{region}}}}} | Unknown region}}. Alternatively, if the sub-templates only hold the 'approved region name', with the rest of the category name in the external category call, then having a blank region might not be a problem. E.g. [[{{region-resolve/{{{region}}}}} articles missing geocoordinate data]]... would place any articles with an unrecognized region code into an 'arcticles missing geocoordinate data' category. If multiple 'region' names should point to the same category (e.g. 'US' vs 'U.S.' vs 'USA' vs 'United States' et cetera) the various sub-templates could all re-direct to a single page with the standard/default naming style... that would allow any changes needed to the category name to be made in just one place. This and the aforementioned 'giant switch' are really the only options for doing these mass region to category mappings currently available. Most of the really big constructs (unit conversions, flags, et cetera) use the sub-template method to avoid transclusion limit problems. --CBD 13:34, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Perfect, that's the one thing I was concerned on.

So, to re-iterate, if this project wants this to be done, here's the steps that have to be taken:

1. Template coord missing (and ideally coord) would need to be modified to allow "region" and other named parameters from the url encoded stuff. This, I believe, can be just added to the present template so that both the old way and new way will work (only the new way, however, will provide the categories at the end of the day). This step should be done before worrying about categories just to make sure there's no issues with resulting wikitext and linkage.
2. Categorization via the region/etc pieces can be added as a subtemplate call when these named parameters are present. Again, implement and check
3. The project would then need to do two steps:
   • Fill in all the subtemplates (the "region-resolve/US") with the rightly named category.
   • Request a bot to help convert the old style "region:US" to "region=US" parameters. This is a trivial bot, and probably could be done in AWB, but given the numbers of instances, I think you want to use a bot.

If done with both coord and coord mission, you'll have a way of instantly categorizing all geo-located articles without a problem. --MASEM 14:03, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Draft proposal for format

Following on from the discussion above, here's a summary of what I think the consensus is so far:

Tag format:

• Something like {{coord missing|type:landmark_region:US-OR|display=title}}
• Since we will only ever use "display=title" when using {{coord missing}, this need only be a dummy parameter, to make it as easy as possible for other editor to convert the template to a real geotag

I don't follow. We use the same template parameter in {{coord}}. --Tagishsimon (talk) 13:46, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

That's exactly why we should have it in {{coord missing}}: so they user can leave it there when they convert the template into a {{coord}} template. I'm assuming here that we won't ever be using {{coord missing}} inline... -- The Anome (talk) 13:50, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Okay, I follow. I think I was just having an English comprehension problem. We have the parameter in missing, but we make no use of it. Suggest we change that line to "The parameter "display=title" in {{coord missing}, will be a dummy parameter, to make it as easy as possible for other editor to convert the template to a real geotag. It is not used to control positioning of the {{coord missing} message in an article." is it reflects the actuality. --Tagishsimon (talk) 14:38, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

I'd like to be able to use {{coord missing}} with |display=inline,title, in infoboxes. The output should still only be in the title bar; but it will remind future editors to include both outputs, once they've added the coordinates. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 15:09, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Category format:

• Pragmatically, something like Category:Articles missing geocoordinate data/region:US-OR or Category:Articles missing geocoordinate data/US/OR?
  • Ideally, something like Category:United States articles missing geocoordinate data/Oregon?

    (However, this is probably not worth it, if we need to generate a massive system of templates and switch statements in order to do it. We can always generate an index page for Wikiproject participants to use.)

• We will need to be able to postprocess the region values, since it's unreasonable to have categories for every sub-region of every country in the world, and many articles will not be in any case be auto-taggable down to the subregion level, or even, in some cases, the country level. I suggest only enabling subregions for countries with very large numbers of tags.
• Ideally, we can do this with a regular expression: this should then also be backwards-compatible with the existing old-format {{coord missing}} tags during the conversion period, since none of them have a parameter containing the string "region:"

-- The Anome (talk) 13:34, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

1. Using US-OR and requiring template coding to map to "United States" and "OR" or "Oregon" will lock out many contributors with interests in specialized areas. Keep the template and usage simple, so people can manually maintain and create various subregions, or you'll have people mucking up the template when trying to add the administrative regions of Chile.
2. Also, there is no need for {{coord missing}} to resemble other templates, particularly because there are several ways that coordinates are supplied (notably infoboxes).
3. For subregions, you might want to define a format for using the subregion field for things which are smaller than states, as the large California state might want to create subregions, and New York City or Sao Paulo might need city categorization. I suggest the State-equivalent name should always be given first followed by increasingly more specific things in a comma-separated list perhaps in parens: Illinois (Chicago, Chicago Loop).
4. It should be stated that a new subregion should not be created unless you find at least 25 members to place in that category (the bot's initial subregion run is excluded from this guidance because it will be recognizing subregions which are reasonably likely to be necessary). -- SEWilco (talk) 19:20, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Proposed goals of the {{coord missing}} activity

Here's a quick statement of my proposed goals for this template and its associated activities:

1. To cue individual users to add coordinates to existing articles
2. To create a general expectation among new article creators that articles about locatable subjects should always be geotagged
3. To group articles by regions, to allow country WikiProjects to work systematically to geocode "their" articles
4. To raise awareness of WikiProject Geographical coordinates in general, to bring more participants here
5. To provide a hook for other bot-driven geotagging efforts

In order to do this, we need:

• Consensus for the need for such a template [done]
• A design for its appearance within the article [done, by re-using the design created by the de: community]
• Adding it to tens of thousands of articles, without any significant blowback from the greater community [well on its way: tens of thousands of articles have now been tagged]
  • Note: community blowback has been the problem with all previous efforts in this direction; this time, by using the location allocated for title coordinates in articles, we seem to have avoided that
• A category system to group tagged articles [draft only, currently]
• A design for its parameters [draft only, currently]

and then, when all of the above are done, and the templates re-written appropriately,

• An outreach program towards the country WikiProjects

-- The Anome (talk) 12:17, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Incomplete sets

We could also do with a template (like {{coord missing}}; or like {{ISBN}}, perhaps?) for incomplete sets of coordinates, for example List of volcanoes in Taiwan. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 20:04, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Objections

The article page is not the place for this tag IMO. That's what the talk page for an article is for, same as requests for illustrative images, requests for infoboxes, and other minor improvements which need making to an article. The front page should only have warnings where the article breaches one of the major wikipedia principles (WP:VERIFY, WP:NPOV, WP:NOR and WP:BLP). --VinceBowdren (talk) 12:13, 4 October 2008 (UTC)

Good point. Do sports players' pages have article warnings that statistics are missing? -- SEWilco (talk) 20:18, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

So, on the same principle, you would get rid of all stub notices and copyediting templates? 60,000 of these {{coord missing}} templates have so far produced exactly two complaints, and two comments agreeing with them, all of which can be found on this page. Moreover, unlike in-article boxes or stub notices, {{coord missing}} takes up no article space at all. In any case, these notices should be a relatively short-term phenomenon, long-term aim to to remove these notices altogether by geocoding every locatable article; of which more soon. -- The Anome (talk) 20:45, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Actually, there are currently four complants. If you read the guidelines, you would see the reasons for the exceptions. Stub notices are disclaimers, as are copyedit tags. I copied the posts from below, I'm surprised you didn't notice my misplaced notice as I asked you where this discussion was!? None would object to it being on the talk, but 100 000+ edits to main space without discussion will cause a lot of drama. Please help to avoid this. cygnis insignis 21:07, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

{{ISBN}} and {{listdev}} are not "disclaimers". Simple experience shows that having the templates on article pages results in more people adding the missing coordinates than having them on talk pages. There was prior discussion; and there will only be drama if people choose to create it. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:22, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Taking each case on its merits, yes I would support a policy of often moving such warnings to the talk page. As you point out the coord missing template takes up little article space (though obviously not none) and isn't too distracting. On the other hand, the technical difficulty of finding co-ordinates and adding the coord template means that I don't think this template will actually prompt very much immediate help from passing editors (by comparison with the ease of adding to a stub article). --VinceBowdren (talk) 21:28, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Your addition of the coord missing template to a large number of articles has prompted little complaint here, true; but the only people who are likely to take the time to find this wikiproject and express an opinion are committed editors - whereas it is the ordinary reader just trying to read an article who is most likely to be adversely affected. As experienced editors, we often find it hard to take into account the difference between our perspective and that of the casual readers (who vastly outnumber us of course); and when we are actively involved in a particular project we can also fail to see how our area of interest is actually only a minor concern to most people. So the geographers add the coord missing template to an article, the sports enthusiasts add a stats-missing template, the style-experts add a copyedit template, and before long an article's content can be swamped by editors' notices to each other. --VinceBowdren (talk) 21:28, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

P.S. This issue has been raised and discussed more broadly here --VinceBowdren (talk) 21:28, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

That discussion ends "To sum up: Large tags are essentially talk content...". This is by no stretch of the imagination a "large tag". Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:52, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Could VinceBowdren (or anyone) explain how exactly anyone is "adversely affected" by the template? --Tagishsimon (talk) 08:17, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

The template invites editors to add the coordinates, it would serve the same purpose by being placed on the talk page. I'm sure a hidden category would be acceptable to our community. Templates in main space are addressed to the reader, not editors, and your worthwhile venture is not intended for this audience. cygnis insignis 10:07, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

I agree.--Knulclunk (talk) 16:35, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other, but having it in the article does concisely tell a reader looking for a coordinate that the article doesn't have one, so there's no need for them to carefully read the article to find it. —EncMstr (talk) 21:13, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Article tidyness is an excellent goal, but the primary goal here is to write an free encyclopedia, which is the sole purpose of these notices: an article about a place without a location might as well be an article without a name. If you want a pretty encyclopedia, Encarta and Britannica do a much better job.

There is ample official policy to justify this:

The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally.

If we wanted a pretty encyclopedia, we wouldn't let the public edit it at all. Instead, we'd have Nupedia, which was orderly and clean. And empty.

These notices serve the same purpose as stub notices, and are designed, just like stub notices, to talk to the general reader, to encourage "drive-by" geocoding, rather than to WikiProjects. They appear not to have elicited any complaints from general readers; 60,000 of these {{coord missing}} templates have so far produced exactly twofour complaints, all of which can be found on this page. There is also ample precedent for this on the de: Wikipedia, where similar templates have worked, and are working, very well at achieving the encylopedia goals of the Wikipedia project.

Talk page notices have been tried before, and have failed to achieve any significant effect. With over 100,000 articles remaining to geocode, the only practical way to get the remainder of the article geocoded is to invoke the mass effort of ordinary readers.

There are only two practical arguments against in-article templates: that they are ugly, and detract from the ordinary reader's experience, and that they serve no function to the ordinary reader.

Unlike in-article boxes or stub notices, which I agree are ugly, {{coord missing}} is discreet, and takes up no article space at all. If they detract from the ordinary reader's experience, so do coordinates and stub notices. Perhaps we should remove them, too?

Moreover, I hope to make this template actually useful to the general reader, as well as to the encyclopedia project, very soon, by enabling them to be used to look up articles in maps by name and country, something which the toolserver page does not currently support, but could easily be adapted to do so. Presumably you would not object to this?

Finally, these notices should be a relatively short-term phenomenon, the medium-term aim is to remove these notices almost altogether by a massive distributed effort towards geocoding every locatable article; of which more soon; the long term aim is to integrate the gelocation interface into the MediaWiki software completely. -- The Anome (talk) 21:34, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm for {{coord missing}}; so much so that I've been working to get rid of them! They work and are discreet. Talltim (talk) 19:57, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

I too object to adding the {{coord missing}} to pages. Then as VinceBowdren pointed out above we can just as well start to add all kinds of non-urgent, non-warning requests to pages. For instance, some people used to put requests on biography articles for uploading an image of that person. After extensive discussion consensus became that such requests is a bad thing and those requests have been removed from the articles.

And The Anomebot2 was adding {{coord missing}} to pages such as Igloo who are not located at one place. I looked around and the only bot approval I can find is the Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/The Anomebot2, and that only includes adding known coordinates to pages. And I doubt the bot will get bot approval for adding {{coord missing}}. So I blocked the bot, since it is running a questionable task and does not have bot approval for that task. --David Göthberg (talk) 06:51, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Could VinceBowdren (or anyone) explain how exactly anyone is "adversely affected" by the template? --Tagishsimon (talk) 08:17, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Great job, David. {{coord missing}} is a geotag, and thus would fall well within the scope of Wikipedia:Bots/Requests for approval/The Anomebot2, namely "that will add geotags to allready-existing geographical articles without geotags". — Preceding unsigned comment added by Tagishsimon (talk • contribs) 08:18, 14 October 2008

A Centralised discussion is required, for the same reasons as the image missing template. cygnis insignis 08:52, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Tagishsimon: If every project that would like something added to articles would be allowed to add a "data wanted tag" to all articles, then pretty much every article on Wikipedia would be flooded with tags. No matter how small the tags were they would then more or less drown out the text in the articles. And that would be a huge problem.

Tagishsimon: I suggest you reread that bot approval. The Anome there speaks about getting coordinates from public domain sources "and rubbing vigorously" and "geodata available". He does not mention anywhere that he intends to mark articles that he does not have geodata for.

cygnis insignis: Yes, this have to be discussed and announced in much broader forums where not only the geodata geeks hang out, before any consensus on a new thing like adding the {{coord missing}} can be declared.

--David Göthberg (talk) 09:23, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I also think that a centralised discussion would be useful. The discussion is ongoing on the talk page at WP:TMC, without quite reaching any conclusions. The original poster has also raised a centralised discussion at the Village Pump without getting much response. It seems that there have been occasional discussions about the balance between reader-friendliness and editor-usefulness in particular cases (e.g. Wikipedia:Centralized discussion/Image placeholders) but I haven't yet found any over-arching conclusions or guidelines or whatever. --VinceBowdren (talk) 10:33, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

The conclusion to the place holder discussion was: There was significant opposition to the use of images such as Replace this image female and Replace this image male and these should no longer be used on article pages. The same thing happened to spoiler tags, but not to stub tags. I will once again propose that this tag be placed on the talk page, where geodata savvy editors can find those articles that need them. cygnis insignis 11:18, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

So you grant, implicitly, that this is a geotag? And run that by me again: the tag is using article space that is only ever used by a coordinate tag to note that there are no coordinates for the article. In what way is that in any way comparable to the larger straw-man tags of which you speak? As I have asked once before, in what way does this tag adversely affect anyone? --Tagishsimon (talk) 10:30, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Progress

To find who have been fulfilling the coord missing requests, I looked through a pseudo-random set of a couple hundred articles where it had been done, and found 142 distinct users involved in that subset. 8 of them (5.6%) were anonymous, and 7 redlinked (new?). Does this reflect general Wikipedia editing structures, are they all geogeeks, and is this progress different from that of the talk page coordinate requests?

List of some users who have fulfilled coord missing requests

41.242.13.40[5], 67.170.179.175[6], 70.189.68.116[7], 71.172.187.238[8], 81.154.230.101[9], 96.50.12.166[10], 131.107.0.73[11], 195.52.10.253[12], 5minutes[13], Adavidb[14], Admiral Norton[15], Americasroof[16], Amol.Gaitonde[17], Ando228[18], Angr[19], Angusmclellan[20], Appraiser[21], Arichnad[22], ArnoldReinhold[23], Autodidactyl[24], Averette[25], B.S. Lawrence[26], Babakathy[27], Berland[28], Bidgee[29], BIL[30], Bleakcomb[31], Bms4880[32], Brian Crawford[33], Cacahuate[34], Ccwaters[35], Chick Bowen[36], CJLippert[37], CSvBibra[38], Darwinek[39], David Edgar[40], Davumaya[41], Deconstructhis[42], Denis tarasov[43], Dhadams[44], Docu[45], Doktorbuk[46], DoubleBlue[47], DoxTxob[48], Dramatic[49], Dual Freq[50], Editor5807[51], Elnuko[52], EncMstr[53], English Northerner[54], Fconaway[55], Feline Hymnic[56], Gabefarkas[57], Gallaiis[58], GcSwRhIc[59], GDibyendu[60], Gueneverey[61], Guliolopez[62], H005[63], Htonl[64], Hu Totya[65], Hughesdarren[66], Hypotaxis[67], Imatoki[68], Jabbawok[69], Jaegow[70], JasterMereel[71], JeremyA[72], JMK[73], JoeyBagODonuts[74], Joowwww[75], Josheganwyer[76], Katpatuka[77], Katr67[78], Ken Gallager[79], Knulclunk[80], Kostisl[81], KTo288[82], Lancevortex[83], Langcliffe[84], LordAmeth[85], Madalino[86], Markussep[87], Mattsrevenge[88], Meister[89], Merenta[90], Mfield[91], Mick Knapton[92], M-le-mot-dit[93], MortimerCat[94], N2xjk[95], Noodle snacks[96], Northmetpit[97], Nv8200p[98], Occuli[99], Old Moonraker[100], Orderinchaos 2[101], P199[102], Paralympic[103], Paranormal Skeptic[104], Paul 012[105], Penpen[106], Peter I. Vardy[107], Pfly[108], Phichanad[109], Pigsonthewing[110], Pterre[111], R.Schuster[112], Ralphbk[113], RFBailey[114], Robbiegiles[115], Rogerd[116], Rrius[117], Rumping[118], Saberwyn[119], Schumi555[120], Smalljim[121], Snigbrook[122], Specious[123], Spencer[124], Stepheng3[125], StevenBlack[126], Swithlander[127], Tabletop[128], Tagishsimon[129], Talltim[130], Tcncv[131], The Anome[132], TheEgyptian[133], Tjarrett[134], TJRC[135], Traveler100[136], Travisl[137], TripleThree[138], TubularWorld[139], Twas Now[140], Twinzor[141], Waggers[142], Waltloc[143], Vernon39[144], Woodstone[145], Zeagler[146]

Since clicking on so many articles is quite a bit of work, would anyone be interested in programming with the MediaWiki API a tool that looks through a set of articles and finds the revision where coordinates were added? I've made available a list of articles where User:The Anomebot2 added coordinate requests and which now have coordinates; there are currently 2578 such articles. --Para (talk) 17:25, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Thank you: that's very interesting, and exceeds my wildest hopes at this point in the game. Given that there were only about 102,000 articles tagged, and that nearly all of these were being tagged during the two week period where the bot was still operating, and there were thus only an average of about 51,000 articles tagged, averaged over the period, this equates to an estimated average rate of about 2.5% of {{coord missing}} articles being tagged per week.

Extrapolating this would suggest that after 12 months, an exponential process of attrition would result in 0.975^52 or approx 3/4 of all tagged articles having been done; in 18 months, about 85% would be done, without any central mechanism other than the existence of the tags.

There are very few "geogeeks" on that list, and some at least appear to be brand new editors.

All this without the "fantastical" outreach scheme yet in action: and we can do much better with organized systematic efforts than we can with random spontaneous attrition. -- The Anome (talk) 20:44, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I would be cautious about that extrapolation. Firstly, you haven't got a comparison i.e. you haven't checked how fast co-ordinates were added to untagged articles; and on a more subtle note, you're likely to have two distinct effects; users who have a page on their watchlist who when they see the tag being added are prompted immediately to add co-ordinates, and users who notice the tag as they're reading or editing a page and are prompted then to make the necessary change. Because all the tags are pretty new you're seeing a lot of the first effect right now, but it is the second effect which will matter in the long term and that might work at a much slower rate. --VinceBowdren (talk) 16:01, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Coord missing centralised discussion

So. Let's centralise the discussion here, and, I suggest, let's set out a SWOT analysis in the table below. Announcements made at [147] and [148]

The issue is, should {{coord missing}} publish a message "Coordinates needed: you can help!" to the top right of articles as it is currently doing, or should the message be on the talk page? There's an example at Abbey Pumping Station. --Tagishsimon (talk) 11:13, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

That's not entirely true. Up until about yesterday there were no "Coordinates needed" message at all, not in the articles nor on the talk pages. So your table below lacks the column: "No {{coord missing}} tag on any page".

--David Göthberg (talk) 11:54, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

It is your statement which is not true. {{coord missing}} has already been in widespread use, for over two weeks; to good effect [149]. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 12:02, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

That's correct. The first bot-added {{coord missing}} tag was added to Torralba Del Río on 2008-09-28, after initial discussion here to reach consensus about this approach. After an initial trial 3000 articles were tagged, further discussion was undertaken to refine the proposal, and the rest of the tagging run followed. -- The Anome (talk) 13:13, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

And it is worth adding that there were a number of discussions more than a year ago, around templates such as {{locateme}}, the concusion of which was that because of their size, they should be on the talk page. The {{coord missing}} discussions started from that experience, and a number of those who were unhappy with {{locateme}} being on the article page are more than happy with {{coord missing}}. David, the table below is there for anyone to add to. Please don't expect anyone else to make the anti-case for you. If you have something to say, say it in the table. Same goes for anyone else who is anti. --Tagishsimon (talk) 14:00, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Glad I'm not the only one who was unable to follow the instructions. How to add geodata is not useful to the reader. Building the encyclopedia happens in user space, by editors, and appears in main space. Links in articles are to more reader information - not to specific wikiprojects, etc., - this underpins many guidelines in the MOS. This is a good thing, and one of the reasons readers come here: we don't suck. cygnis insignis 13:31, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

We don't suck because we have useful information in articles. Location is probably the single most important piece of information for any geographical article, and geographical coordinates are the only way to do it right.

Your comment that your were "glad" you were not the only one unable to follow instructions bemuses me. If I'm unable to do something, my first reaction is to want to know how to do it, not to take comfort from others' shared inability. If there's a problem with the instructions, the correct solution is to fix the instructions, not to abolish the thing in question. You shouldn't extrapolate from your experience of not being able to follow the instructions; other editors seem to have done this without problems, see below.

Building the encyclopedia is the single most important goal of Wikipedia, to the point of it being written into the Foundation's charter.

If we were to take your approach to its logical conclusion, we would also remove all stub article notices, every one of which says "X is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it" which also violate your principle of "no user information in article space". If you truly want to rid article space of user communication, I suggest you start there, since there are many more stub notices than coord missing tags.

However, no-one is ever going to allow that, because it would act against the central goal of building the encyclopedia. From a geographical point of view, any article about a geolocatable object that does not say where its subject is is a stub, and coord missing serves the same purpose of advancing the central goal of building the encyclopedia.

This subproject is attempting to do that, and so far over 320,000 articles have been geocoded. The bot has so far added useful information to over 100,000+ articles by itself, and the {{coord missing}} program is intended to add geodata to another 100,000+, at the very small cost of some temporary minor clutter to articles from tags which are intended to go away as rapidly as possible, by being replaced by real coordinates.

If you don't like the {{coord missing}} tags, you can very easily add coordinate information to replace them. Geocoding articles is much easier than destubbing them, and the plan is for {{coord missing}} to drive a massive distributed effort to do so. If you're not willing to do this, other people will do it for you. All you have to do is not to stand in the way of it happening.

I'd also like to point out that more useful user-accessible information is coming real soon now to {{coord missing}}, via links to map services using the article name and country information. -- The Anome (talk) 13:39, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I meant no offense to the user, the diff followed another example posted above. I try to avoid addressing editors directly in discussions. cygnis insignis 14:24, 14 October 2008 (UTC) [emph. add] 14:45, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

The diff you provided did not support your argument, cygnis. User:Jonathan Oldenbuck successfully added coordinates to the article, albeit using a by now deprecated coordinate. That does not show a lack of understanding of the business of adding coords, merely a lack of appreciation that {{coor}} had by 2 October been deprecated. --Tagishsimon (talk) 14:29, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

'Building the encyclopedia' is not an overriding goal (either of wikipedia or the wikimedia foundation). It has to simultaneously function as a working encyclopedia. --VinceBowdren (talk) 18:13, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

"The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally." (my emphasis) according to http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Frequently_Asked_Questions ... any argument that building the encyclopedia is not goal misses the point by a long margin. Arguments about whether or not it is overriding are moot. Clearly there must be a balance between building and disseminating. We're back to the fundamental point: you think, for your own good reasons, that one more link is breaking camels' backs. We do not; we think it is in the long term interest of the camels. I really doubt that we're going to get beyond this fairly fundamental difference in opinion. --Tagishsimon (talk) 18:36, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

You're right, I don't think this debate here will ever get beyond that. My contribution has obviously come in very late to a project which has been working on this tag for a long time, has a lot invested in it, and will not be easily dissuaded by a small number of outsiders objecting at this stage. However I am still hoping to convince anybody watching that there is a usability issue to such tags as this, and that a valuable debate could be had (in a more central location) about what kinds of tag should go in article space, what justifications are necessary, and at what point the balance should be struck. Then a group such as this one which wishes to drive a project such as adding more geographical precision to articles (or whatever their particular interest is) would have the benefit of guidelines about how to pursue their goals without unduly infringing article space; and if any editors did complain, then you could quite simply defend yourselves by pointing to how you are following the standard guidelines and not need to get into philosophical debates which many of you consider time-wasting. --VinceBowdren (talk) 18:52, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

I'm bound to agree with all of your points bar the last. It's more that having commissioned the template, we're bound in good faith to discuss it, even when we'd rather be geocoding articles. We're not against philosophical debate per se, but merely prefer to do it at a time of our choosing. But it's a rod we've made for our own back, so mustn't grumble.

I suspect there has been centralised debate in the past - the issue is far from new, and the wikipedia far to large for me to know all of what's there. I'm not convinced the centralised debate thing works that very much better than the project-specific debate ... it presupposes that there is a centre, and/or that people read the pages which would signpost them to that centre. But in the matter of policy on article space tags (which policy I have not looked for or at before writing this, I confess) I fully support the idea of having well considered guidelines outwith which any tagger steps at their own risk. --Tagishsimon (talk) 19:30, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

• I found it useful to use 'what links here' (with various things switched on or off) to existing categories to find 'coord missing' in my locality eg see Derbyshire. I don't think this would work if coord missing was on talk pages. Occuli (talk) 14:39, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Andy: I am not a member in this project. I have no duty to know the exact date you guys started tagging articles with {{coord missing}}. I noticed that this was going on because the additions of that template started to turn up in my watchlist one or two days ago. If you reread my comment above you will see that the essential part of it is that the table below should have a column for the option of how it was before you guys started the tagging, if the table should be anywhere "complete". Bickering about the exact date the tagging started is not constructive.

Tagishsimon: I am not in the habit of writing arguments on talk pages without signing them. And that is what the table below amounts too: Lots of anonymous arguments. So I am not exactly in the mood to edit that table. I have already stated what the problems are with this "data wanted" tagging in my comments in the previous section.

The Anome: You know, the vast majority of users do not own a GPS navigator, so they couldn't care less about geo coordinates. So claiming that such coordinates is the "single most important piece of information for any geographical article" is a pretty grand statement.

The Anome: Ah, I was waiting for that number. So you were actually starting that bot run to tag 100,000+ articles with {{coord missing}} without having a bot approval for that task and without seeking a broader consensus first? That's a really serious breach of policies. You really should read up on the policies. And I really mean that, you really should read up on the policies.

Anyone who knows the answer: I am really curious what that planned "outreach to Wikiprojects" is, that is supposed to "result in wholesale replacement of coord missing tags by full coordinate sets". Could you tell something more about that? It sounds very fantastic.

--David Göthberg (talk) 15:19, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

David: the solution, then, is to sign those additions you make the the table. The solution is not to expect others to do your clerical work for you. --Tagishsimon (talk) 15:23, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I don't think anybody is arguing that this tag should be removed altogether, so IMO the table is fine without a further column. --VinceBowdren (talk) 15:38, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Who said you had such a duty? You made a false statement, I corrected it. Who is "bickering"? Please don't put up straw men like that and like your "GPS unit" comment; coordinates are also used in on-line maps and tools like Google Earth. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 15:30, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

David, to answer your points:

• Tens of millions of people now own Internet-connected GPS navigators; they're called "cellphones". The number is increasing by the tens of millions each yet. Every iPhone 3G is a GPS navigator, and Apple have sold about 10 million this year [150], and expected to sell about 25 million next year [151]; Nokia have been selling similar phones for some time, and are expected to sell 35 million GPS navigator phones this year [152] All the other phone manufacturers are also selling GPS-enabled phones.

• Update: about 175 million GPS-enabled phones were sold in 2007, according to this estimate[153], rising at a rate of about 25% per year. So, if that forecast was correct, and even if no other GPS units existed in the world prior to that point, there should now be almost 400 million "GPS navigators" worldwide. Since only about a billion people are connected to the Internet at this point, and Wikipedia users are probably more likely to own a smartphone than other Internet users, it is quite possible that a slim majority of Wikipedia users currently have a "GPS navigator" on their person. As you can see, it is likely that this figure will grow to an overwhelming majority within a couple of years, from a combination of phone ownership growth in the developing world and existing phone users upgrading their phones to the latest model.

• As you can see from my other comments, I believe that the bot charter covers the {{coord missing}} activity; the tags are geotags (see discussion passim), the information involved in generating the dataset was generated by extensive data mining combined with manual correction and systematic review.
• About the outreach program; the plan is to contact individual WikiProjects by hand, providing them with machine-generated reports of articles needing geocoding, and other tools to make the process easier. I'm already creating the tools to do this, and I'd be getting on with it now if I wasn't enmeshed in this argument. -- The Anome (talk) 16:46, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Regarding the claim that this tag will only be temporary - I don't think this will be plausible, any more than you could claim that the stub tag could be temporary. Of course there will always be articles missing geographic co-ordinates, as new articles are created for example. I therefore propose it should be removed from the table --VinceBowdren (talk) 15:43, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I mean "temporary" in the sense that the current vast number of articles tagged should be reduced to a only a small fraction within 18 months from now. Eventually, I'd like to see these tags only on very-early-stage stubs. -- The Anome (talk) 16:50, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Actually, on thinking about what I would like to add to the table, there's a wider discussion which needs to happen about the balance between reader-usability and editor-usability. For example it is currently listed as a strength that putting the tag on the template page would hide coord request to all but specialised users - but that is exactly what I want to raise as a strength! We really will be talking at cross-purposes in this debate unless we resolve an acceptable compromise on this issue first, which is the Centralized discussion I thought was being suggested. --VinceBowdren (talk) 15:50, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

This is the crux. Ideally, we'd both like to see these templates gone from articles. From my perspective, you appear to value the goal of purity over the goal of information, by moving them to talk pages where they can't do any harm. The participants on this WikiProject would prefer to get rid of them by replacing them with encyclopedic information.

Wikipedia, however strange it sounds to say it, is not an encyclopedia; it's an encyclopedia project that is a work in progress. Building the encyclopedia is the principal goal. Tidying it up can come later.

Not too much later, if I have my way; I'd like to remove these tags by kicking off a huge wave of human-driven effort that will replace them with coordinates as soon as reasonably possible. The tags are merely a means to that end. -- The Anome (talk) 16:58, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

For what it's worth, the {{coord missing}} flag has prompted me to manually update coordinates to more than 130 articles in the last seven days. If this had been hidden on a talk page -- like "needs a photo" or "needs a map" requests usually are -- I'd have never made these changes. Although I'm a relatively casual editor, I'm also a geography enthusiast, and I've gotten a lot of enjoyment learning about mountain ranges, fault lines, university stadiums, rivers, parks, canals, and theaters that I've never heard of before. I greatly appreciate the visible, non-obtrusive nature of this flag, and can't understand what logic would relegate this to a talk page, while keeping the "This article is a stub..." on the article page. I would go as far to say it's not even as obtrusive as "citation needed", which is appropriately pervasive in Wikipedia.

Also, FWIW, an added effect of my editing of these pages is that I'm also cleaning up some of them in little chunks, including a new redirect, an AfD, added citations, formatting, grammar, spelling, correction of incorrect facts, repair of incorrect related coordinates, and dead link fixes. Travisl (talk) 16:49, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

VinceBowdren, exactly who is "adversely affected" by this template, and how are they so affected? This goes to the heart of your point about determinnig whether the template on the article page is a strength or not. The Pro side has adduced reasons why we think it is a strength. You have yet to explain why it is a weakness, and I have insufficient imagination to understand how anyone is being adversely affected by the template. We have equally explained why it would be a weakness to constrain it to the talk page. This is the centralised discussion. It is now time for you to explain this point. --Tagishsimon (talk) 16:53, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

David, I have looked back through the debate, and have added the single concrete objection you provided, namely that "If every project that would like something added to articles would be allowed to add a "data wanted tag" to all articles, then pretty much every article on Wikipedia would be flooded with tags." If you have anything more coherent to add than your dislike of the template and Anome's bot, please let us know. --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:15, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I have previously objected to the use of coordinate requests on articles directly for this very reason. This time I however have no issue, as the design of the request is considerably different, unlike anything else on Wikipedia. The note is in a standardised position on the page that is only used by coordinates and sometimes a few icons; it does not make the page any longer as the empty "placeholder" is always there. The page might as well help potentional editors fill the Wikipedia article "form template" and complete the missing information. Other than the article title, I can't think of any other element that's always there in all Wikipedia articles. The image placeholders were different, as they pushed the rest of the information on the page down. Similarly, infoboxes with missing information do not and should not be asking editors to add the information. --Para (talk) 17:50, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

You might also want to read the slippery slope article, about the slippery slope argument as logical fallacy. -- The Anome (talk) 17:31, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

I am not arguing that if this one tag is admitted, then there will be an inevitable landslide of unwanted tags; that would indeed be an invalid argument. I am arguing that each individual data-missing tag in article space already has a deleterious effect, which it would not if it were on the article's talk page.

On the other hand it is of course useful to see the deleterious effect when an article has a large number of data-missing tags at the head of the page, to make it more obvious. --VinceBowdren (talk) 18:23, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Every reader is adversely affected. If a reader is simply after information about a place, then anything in the article which is not about that place (including information about the article or wikipedia) is a distraction. Everything from stub tags to the coord missing is a fact about the article and about wikipedia (which is helpful to editors) but not helpful if you're simply reading the encyclopedia. --VinceBowdren (talk) 11:00, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Really?. Is the reader "adversely affected" by, say, the reload button on their browser? By the Wikipedioa logo in the right corner? In the balance between building an encyclopedia and rendering an encyclopedia to the end user, are you really seeking to make the case that such is the adverse effect of the "coordinate missing: you can help!" message, that it should be withdrawn? In the same balance, would you concede that there's a possibility that such a message might draw in users who otherwise would not contribute to the building the encyclopedia aim?--Tagishsimon (talk) 11:22, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, the reader really is adversely affected. It's a well-known fact in the usability field that each bit of visual clutter on a screen makes it a little slower for the user to identify the bit they're after. In the case of the reload button, there is a strong case for keeping it because of the frequent and important job it does; but just for illustration, it's worth taking a look at the new Google Chrome browser for an example of the benefits of removing this kind of clutter.

Yes, I am suggesting that the adverse affect of this message hasn't been considered and there is a case for removing this and a lot of the other tags which are added to the article.

Yes, I do concede that it may help draw in readers to become editors. Wikipedia is not a pure finished encyclopedia like Britannica so the article page has to contain extra stuff (the Edit This Page link to give an obvious example), but the balance between wikipedia's different aims (allowing the reader to just read an article, allowing editors to edit articles, encouraging readers to join in editing, etc) is one which we (editors) have to take into account, and often fail at. --VinceBowdren (talk) 14:12, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

"Every reader is adversely affected - I'm not (I suspect that Tagishsimon and The Anome are not, too), so that's your false assertion disproved. Before you make similar statements in future, please be ready to back them up with supporting evidence. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 16:34, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

As before, I was using 'reader' to mean somebody who is reading wikipedia solely to get information out - on the opposite end of the scale from an active editor, such as yourself, Tagishsimon and The Anome. As I've tried to explain, the concerns and requirements of a reader in this sense are quite different from those of an editor, and it is the balance between those concerns which editors frequently fail to take into account. You yourself missed the point I was making by thinking that 'reader' referred to somebody like yourself.

As for evidence, the usability field has developed standard guidelines based on detailed experimental evidence; one of these (listed at heuristic evaluation is that a user interface should have "Simple and natural dialogue (Aesthetic and minimalist design)". --VinceBowdren (talk) 18:02, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

I imagine that "Coordinates needed: you can help!" eminently fits the maxim of "Simple and natural dialogue (Aesthetic and minimalist design)". It is in much the same vein as "discussion", "edit this page", "history", "Privacy policy", "About Wikipedia", "Disclaimers" and other such anchors offered to the user. Far from me missing your point - for I appreciate you are concerned for the passing reader unconcerned with the concepts & techniques of editing - I think you have missed mine: which is that this message in the font size and position selected, will not, fullstop, scare the horses. What we're left with is your opinion and mine: please be charitable enough to understand that other are capable of thinking through the same concepts and coming up with differing conclusions. --Tagishsimon (talk) 18:10, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

I do absolutely concede that this message in its size is admirably discreet; but the point that nobody yet has conceded to me is that, unless it is completely absent, it does have some small distracting effect on a user who is simply trying to read an article. The pro-tag arguments which have been given here do give the impression that this point has not been appreciated by many editors yet. --VinceBowdren (talk) 18:37, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

The usability issue again comes down to the different purposes of a reader and an editor - who are trying to put the article page to two different uses. From the point of view of a reader just trying to read an article, the 'edit this page', 'discussion' and other links are a distraction they could do without! But their massive importance to the project of building wikipedia justifies putting them there. --VinceBowdren (talk) 18:37, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Indeed. I would protest that the experience we had over the {{locateme}} template is plenty of evidence that we have considered the question of balance between editor and reader when it comes to adding tags in article space. In short, there was a fiery debate - some of it at Template talk:Locate me - which led to the said template being taken off article space and put in talk space. All these links are, as you infer, a balance between different needs. We have a different reading than you of the balance of coord missing. It is not that we have not considered the issues, merely that we have considered them differently. --Tagishsimon (talk) 18:44, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Um, no. When I am not editing WP, I often read it. If you meant "all readers (who are not also editors)", you should have said that and not "all readers". But a quick discussion with colleagues in my office today, who never edit WP, showed that they are not adversely affected, either. I can hardly be said to have "missed the point", if you failed to make it correctly. And references to generic articles on usability do not constitute "evidence" in support of your specific claim, even as you have newly qualified it. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 18:46, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

The small-font prompt atop the article looks quite right, but pray tell me, what's the point of placing it on the Big Dig (Boston, Massachusetts) ? what's next, Pacific Ocean ? NVO (talk) 18:34, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

The Big Dig article has a map showing the location concerned. The centre of that map has coordinates. Pacific Ocean already - and rightly - has coordinates. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 18:46, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for that. I've now geocoded the Big Dig with an appropriate location. -- The Anome (talk) 20:26, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

A request to all participants in this debate: please see the subsection "progress" in the older discussion above, if you haven't read it already. The tags are already being replaced by coordinates at a remarkable rate. Now that's what I mean by "temporary". -- The Anome (talk) 20:47, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

You know, I have to agree with User:Travisl. I haven't added as many coordinates as he has (maybe 15 since the last 3 weeks (I know, I can do much more, and I will later), but I find myself also looking over the articles I fix and performing minor cleanup (spelling, spacing, etc.), as well. Spencer^T♦C 23:17, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

SWOT table

Aspect \ template	{{coord missing}} on article page	{{coord missing}} or similar on talk page
Strengths	Discreet: uses space dedicated to coordinates Unobtrusive: uses same font size as coordinates Brings coord issue to the attention of the general user Encourages user participation in tagging articles Is self-limiting; mass-tagging initiative is expected to result in these tags being transitory Helps create expectation that articles about geolocatable subjects should have coordinates Makes it easy to find articles needing tagging using category-intersection tools like CatScan Is already driving other editors to add geocoordinates, even before any outreach to WikiProjects (e.g. [154], [155], [156], [157], Special:Contributions/Travisl,Special:Contributions/Talltim)
Weaknesses	Visible in article	Requires users to edit 2 pages for each coordinate entered Requires two clicks from a category page to get to the article page, before coord can be added. Effectively hides coord request to all but specialised users (as has been demonstrated by the failure of previous similar initiatives)
Risks	Efforts to encourage mass geotagging may fail, resulting in "coord missing" tags persisting without serving any encyclopedic need [Note: this risk now seems increasingly unlikely, given the remarkable success to date after only two weeks, see "Progress" section above] "If every project that would like something added to articles would be allowed to add a "data wanted tag" to all articles, then pretty much every article on Wikipedia would be flooded with tags."	Real likelihood that talk pages will get out of synch with articles, leading to wasted time Loss of opportunity to build the encyclopedia
Opportunities	Provides template in article which can be adapted into a full {{coord}} template Can be used in near future to add name-driven map page lookup, providing grater functionality for readers Outreach to Wikiprojects is expected to result in wholesale replacement of coord missing tags by full coordinate sets, resulting in thousands of articles being made more informative and accessible The greater level of geotagging thus achieved is expected to bring more readers to articles via location-aware devices, and to improve visibility of Wikipedia in partner projects such as Google's web mapping service, thus encouraging further editing, creation and geotagging of articles

More discussion

• Talk page is for tags and to-do lists. Article space is for article content and should be kept clean for our readership. Colonel Warden (talk) 13:18, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

This is argument by bold assertion, and is based on a self-evidently false premise, as is clearly shown by current practice. Consider stub notices which we have by the million, and the many other in-article tags such as {{fact}}, {{who}}, {{expert}}, {{unreferenced}}, {{cleanup}}, {{copyedit}}, and the many other tags in Category:Citation and verifiability maintenance templates, Category:Cleanup templates and so on.

Wikipedia policy is descriptive, not prescriptive, and is evolved through consensus rather by diktat. See Wikipedia:Policies and guidelines. It's clear that "no tags in userspace" is not a Wikipedia policy, or it would surely be being enforced by mass bot-removals of existing tags. (I invite you to try proposing this, and see how far you get with it.)

{{coord missing}} is clearly an inline citation/verifiability tag of the same sort as {{fact}}: a geotag is an essential citation that should be required of every geographic location article to allow its contents to be veirfied against existing maps, atlases, gazetteers and GIS databases. Without it, it would be very easy to create fake place articles. As such, it functions directly to enforce WP:V, which is a core policy.

Given that, I believe that the real issue here is not "are any tags acceptable in userspace?" (clearly the answer to this is "yes", according to common practice), but "is {{coord missing}} an acceptable tag"? As far as I can see, the consensus in the discussion above seems to be "yes". -- The Anome (talk) 13:47, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Colonel Warden is putting it too strongly, but there is something to what he says. There is a difference between information about the article's subject, and information about the article; a lot of information about the article is rightly moved to the talk page, otherwise the article itself would get far far too swamped by discussion. My personal opinion is that some tags have to be present on the article page (even though they are distracting) when an article is in breach of a central wikipedia policy - so for example the {{citation needed}} template should be used on the article where the article breaches WP:VERIFY - but for less crucial problems with the article, it would be better to put a comment or tag on the talk page in order to leave the article more readable. But like I've said above, this is a balance which needs to be more widely debated and discussed before we will be able to reach understanding and a good solution to the debate about {{coord missing}}. --VinceBowdren (talk) 14:37, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I think we're getting closer to a compromise here. I agree with you that Wikiproject-related to-do tags should be put on talk pages, and fix-it tags should be limited to only those functions that are required by core policies.

I believe that the crucial difference between {{coord missing}} and a Wikiproject to-do tag is that it fulfils the core policy of WP:V, by allowing the verification of a geographic location's existence and correct name by reference to maps, gazetteers, GIS databases and other similar sources. A huge number of geographic-location article stubs do not reference any external source: if we were to follow WP:V to the letter, we would probably have to delete them all. I'd much rather fix them by adding geographic coordinates, so that it's at least possible to look them up on a map and verify that there is an actual place of that name in the geographic location specified, and in many cases to be able to use satellite photos to verify that a feature of the sort described lies at the location specified.

Geodata shouldn't be regarded an optional extra for location articles; it should be a core requirement for WP:V compliance. If it exists, you should be able to give its coordinates. -- The Anome (talk) 14:48, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

(EC) Well, good luck with that endeavor. I think it'll be as easy as herding cats. Meanwhile it sounds like the best driving out the good. The view taken by the geo-geeks, as we have been called, is that the coord missing tag is about as discrete as a tag can be. We're not minded to wait until a pan-tag policy has been arrived at. I note that 102,000 tags and more than 24 hours of announced discussions have yielded very few objections, and as many supporting comments. I take away the view that this tag is not even nearly significantly exercising the community. The three concrete arguments against the tag position -- "slippery slope", "tags should not be on article pages" and "adverse effect on readers" are not in my opinion persuasive. Two are fallacies and the third is at best a matter of opinion. Setting those against the evidenced benefit of the tag position suggests to me that way more good is being done than harm.

That said, I too would like more policy on the large tags which despoil so many articles - for instance, that they should be at the foot of the article not the head. But that's another debate entirely. --Tagishsimon (talk) 14:54, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

You're right Anome that lots of geographic articles are in breach of WP:V by being unreferenced, but there are more ways to state a location than by giving co-ordinates, and more ways to verify that information than by linking to mapping data. For example the Sheffield article cites the Oxford English Dictionary (amongst other sources) which says it is "The name of a manufacturing city of Yorkshire" which sounds like a perfectly good citation for geographic data to me. --VinceBowdren (talk) 15:36, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

It says little or nothing about the location of Sheffield, beyond it being in Yorkshire. I presume you're running out of plausible arguments? --Tagishsimon (talk) 15:37, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Where are the previous discussions and requests for consentand community's consent, and community consent for this template's implementation? I notice a short one at Template talk:Locate me that seems related. A list of related links would benefit contributors and readers of this discussion. cygnis insignis 15:14, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Such as the bot's approval? 15:53, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

It is a simple request, it is not on a list of logical fallacies. I have not attempted to present any argument. Please provide links to previous discussions regarding this template's implementation. cygnis insignis 16:14, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

It was not a simple request. You started by making up a procedure which no-one has ever heard of, as if we're somehow derelict for not having followed it. It becomes difficult to continue assuming good faith given such tactics. Your second question - where are the discussions - was answered: this page and its archives, and talk pages of relevant templates. Specific discussion on {{coord missing}} start on this page at "Tagging potentially geolocatable places without coordinates". It is perfectly proper for this project, having had a couple of years of discussing the placement of coord missing type templates (i.e the LocateMe family), to take the decision that it is acceptable to use the article space reserved for the display of coordinates to display a message indicating that there are no coordinates. There is not, to borrow a phrase, a star chamber to which such decisions must be referred: you are very much in error in your understanding of wikipedia if you think there is. Meanwhile we are still at 102k such uses of the template with a bare handful of objections, which at best boil down to subjective opinion. --Tagishsimon (talk) 16:42, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

What is a "request for consent" in the context of a template? It's not a phrase I recognise, although I grant I've only been here daily for the last 4.5 years. Discussions on coord missing type templates will typically be in the archives of this page, or on the talk pages of the relevant templates. IIRC there are about 8 or so locateme type templates. --Tagishsimon (talk) 15:34, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

I agree with Tagishsimon. "Requests for consent"? Whose consent? Is there some new Star Chamber that I've not heard of in my 7-or-so years of Wikipedia participation?

{{LocateMe}} is a red herring. {tl|coord missing}} is not {{LocateMe}}: one's a small-print in-article verifiability request tag, the other's a great big yellow box that belongs on a talk page.

Regarding bot approval: this also appears to be a red herring. As far as I can tell from asking on the Wikipedia talk:Bot Approvals Group, if it's OK for a human to add it to a page, it's OK for a registered bot to do the same.

Meanwhile, {{coord missing}} is getting over a hunded articles geotagged each day, improving the encyclopedia. Which is rather more encyclopedia-building than this discussion is generating. Since we are actively trying to get rid of these tags, if you don't like them, why not just wait for us to get rid of them? Earlier discussions seem to suggest that it shouldn't take much more than 18 months to do the lot, worst case.

Myself, I'm aiming to get the job done in six months, at the end of which we should have geocoded over 100,000 more articles. Can I just ask those participants here who don't like these tags; is that not a good thing? Does it not serve our encyclopedic goals, whilst complying with Wikipedia's core policies, particularly WP:V? Would you prefer that the articles remained uncoded? Are you perhaps volunteering to fix them yourselves instead? -- The Anome (talk) 15:57, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Anome: Oh you twist things so good.

Star Chamber? Yeah, this WikiProject talk page very much is a Star Chamber. But regarding places to seek a broader consensus: Well, for starters we have the Village pumps. I wouldn't exactly call them new, and I hope you have heard about them before?

You state: "if it's OK for a human to add it to a page, it's OK for a registered bot to do the same". So you mean you really think you don't need bot approval for any task that humans may do? That's a brand new interpretation of the bot policies and practises. And you got one brief comment from one user over at the bot approvals group, and that is not even what that person wrote.

And you really should learn to count: "over a hundred articles geotagged each day" (if that number even is true), and 100,000 articles to tag, now that is almost three years. Not 18 months and definitely not 6 months.

--David Göthberg (talk) 19:55, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

This conversation, as you well know, has been flagged up on the village pump. We're not seeing an inundation of nay-sayers. I think you must get around to considering that the vast majority of editors & readers really don't mind. Meanwhile you've clearly now gone beyond the good faith margin, with snarky comments such as "if that number even is true". I'd suggest an apology from you is in order. Would that you'd spent a quarter of the effort you've spent on this page, geocoding articles. --Tagishsimon (talk) 20:23, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Not to mention directing maths-snark at other people. Really, that's not very nice. Let me take you through the figures step by step from scratch; I'm deliberately not looking at my earlier figures, so the results may be a smidgen different because of slightly different approximations and the error-amplifying effect of exponentials, but the gist is the same.

The figure of "over a hundred" that I gave was a deliberate and cautious understatement. The real figure to date has been an average of roughly 2500/16 = 156/day, averaged over the period from when the bot started until now. (I've just double-checked the 2500 figure with a scan of the live database.) Now, since the average number of articles tagged during that period was 1/2 N, where N is the number tagged now, it is, I hope, realistic to assume that with "drive-by" tagging being proportional to the number of articles on display, that that number is more like 312/day now. 100,000 / 312 approx= 320 days exhaustion time, or just short of a year, if the rate of progress is linear from here on in. With an exponential decay, with a reduced rate of progress as the number of articles reduces, the decay rate is thus approximately 1/320 per day, or a daily decay ratio of 0.997/day. 0.997^365 approx= 1/3, 0.997^(365*1.5) = 0.19.

All of this assumes that only the current rate of attrition is maintained, with no coordination or attempt at outreach to other projects.

If we can assume coordination, and hope for linear progress through coordination. It's clear from the figures above that only a factor of two improvement is needed over the current attrition rate to hit the six-month target. If we go exponential again, the relevant figures are 0.994^365 = 0.11 and 0.994^(365 * 1.5) = 0.03 respectively.

Now, we're about to contact two hundred WikiProjects in order to help accelerate the process, at the same time as providing them with a ready-made coordination framework to help them in their efforts. Given that we have an estimate attrition rate of about 300/day at the moment, given absolutely no outreach or publicity at all, I think it's pretty conservative to assume that the attrition rate will at least double, giving the six month target. I'm hoping for a factor of at least ten; but as you can see above, I like to make conservative estimates.

Regarding "twisting things around": David, I'm merely presenting my argument for my position as best I can. I've based my arguments on core policy considerations, because I assumed that you were asking for a serious justification of that position, rather than a vote. (If it was a vote, we'd be done already, by a clear majority in favour, but I think you deserve better than that.) I've also backed up my argument with reasonable estimates based on observed data, and presented arguments against some of your assertions such as the scarcity of "GPS navigators" or your doubts of the validity of the 2500 figure (which I double-checked from the live database, just in case).

Would you like to answer some of the questions I asked about what you would suggest that we should do instead of using {{coord missing}} to drive this process? They're not rhetorical; I'd really like to know the answers. -- The Anome (talk) 22:27, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Coordinate tagging: WikiProject community outreach

Also on the subject of building the encyclopedia: we have just over 100,000 articles currently tagged with {{coord missing}}, which seems like a very large number, and some commenters above have voiced concerns that filling them in by hand might be a "fantastical" project.

Here's how I'm planning to do it.

When divided among hundreds of WikiProjects, 100,000 is not so large a number. Using available machine-readable data, I intend to make a map of which WikiProjects each tagged article is associated with; for example, an archaeological site is relevant to both the relevant country WikiProject and to WikiProject Archaeology, an airport is relevant to both the relevant country WikiProject and to WikiProject Airports, historical features can be assigned to country-history WikiProjects, and so on. Some features, like villages, will only be relevant to geographical WikiProjects.

These will be used to prepare per-WikiProject request lists, neatly sorted and formatted. Where these lists are too big to fit on a page, they can be broken down into sublists, either alphabetically or by subregion where available through machine-parsing of article content. These can then be presented to WikiProjects as voluntary task lists. My experience of similar projects is that people tend to actively enjoy these sorts of challenges. Even if we only get an average of only a single participant from each country WikiProject, that should mean that we could have around 200 people working on tagging.

Just dividing the 100,000 articles up into their respective country WikiProjects will reduce the list to an average of 500 articles per Wikiproject. For smaller countries, there will often only be hundred or so articles to be done. For larger countries, there are many more articles to be done, but they can be reduced to lists of similar size divided by subnational regions; for example, the UK by its constituent countries and counties, the U.S. by its states. Doing this will lead to even shorter task lists. Dividing each list into logical blocks of ten or so articles helps as well; I've found that knocking of a block of ten is a short enough but satisfying enough challenge to be repeated daily or more frequently by enthusiastic completists.

Does this seem like a good plan, and can anyone suggest any improvements? -- The Anome (talk) 16:46, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Good stuff. More power to you. When you've finished with the tagging campaign, I wonder if you'd be interested in turning your attention to the benefits of rubbing our geo-tagged UK articles against the Geograph British Isles photo project, which within the last couple of days announced the capture of its 1,000,000th CC licensed image. --Tagishsimon (talk) 16:54, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Sounds like a great idea. I'll add it to my list, but I probably won't be able to get around to it until later next year; I'd like to get the mass article tagging effort done and dusted first, and get rid of the {{coord missing}} backlog. -- The Anome (talk) 16:56, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Agree. I've already tried to find {{coord missing}} articles in the Oregon Wikiproject using the category tool. I haven't yet figured out a way to do it, because coord missing is in article space and the WikiProject association is in talk space. I maintain an article which lists all project articles, but haven't figured out a way to use that either. Suggestions? —EncMstr (talk) 17:22, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Agree. And there's some irony in EncMstr's predicament, given the placement discussions above. It'll give me something to chuckle about as I wander off into the night, as I'm about to do. --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:28, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it seems somewhat ironic at first sight, but article-space tagging is nevertheless the correct approach, precisely because there is more, and finer-grained, information available there. You might want to intersect the Category:Oregon subtree (you might need to go 4 or 5 levels deep on CatScan) with Category:United States articles missing geocoordinate data: that should sort most of your needs for the short term. This should actually work better than using the WikiProject tags, because it should also find articles that haven't yet been tagged by the WikiProject.

This approach also has the added benefit that it can also pick up smaller, more specialized article sets than the WikiProject-drive approach, by starting with specific subtrees of Category:Oregon such as Category:Military in Oregon or Category:Waterfalls of Oregon. I'd post an example link, but the toolserver is currently down. -- The Anome (talk) 18:21, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Occuli provided an AWB extraction which gives one good handle on the situation. Another is a CatScan to intersect uses of {{coord missing}} with category:Oregon and its subcategories. The aspersion that Wikiproject tagging is hit and miss seems backwards. I think we have a better handle on tagging suitable articles than having them properly categorized. On further reflection, those might be about equally thorough efforts, though by different groups of editors. Thanks to Occuli and The Anome for the ideas. —EncMstr (talk) 19:25, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Here: try this link for a precomposed CatScan that performs the search by category, instead of by tag. It's much quicker. There are currently 198 articles in that category when "Category:Oregon" is scanned to depth 3. I'm just running a depth 4 scan now.-- The Anome (talk) 21:50, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

In general - not a good idea. WikiProjects are already busy with their own priorities and do not really need to be given extra work by well-meaning outsiders. Orderinchaos 22:15, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Removal of visible content

I've just asked on WP:AN/I for a review of the discussion here regarding the bot's block. It's clear from the responses that the participants there don't consider that we have reached a consensus regarding {{coord missing}}. Accordingly, I've removed the visible display element, pending the achievement of a clear cross-community consensus for re-adding it, which I hope can be done soon. I hope to be able to post a proposal for a new format soon. -- The Anome (talk) 13:50, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

For reference, the discussion on WP:AN/I has been archived to here. --VinceBowdren (talk) 10:58, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

I think it's a great pity you've had to do that. I expect that it will result in a reduction of the number of coordinates added (all other things being equal). Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 14:25, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes. I'm quite annoyed by all this; it seems that a few noisy opponents are all that's needed to stop useful things from happening. 300 fewer articles a day are now getting geocoded; a magnificent acheivement with which I can only hope that they can derive satisfaction; I certainly can't.

Meanwhile, back on the "C" ark, I think we can still get to where we want to go, by a number of routes. Firstly, I think we can still run the WikiProject drive, even without a visible tag. Secondly, I'd like to get together a new proposal for a visible tag, and run this through whatever process is needed to achieve a visible cross-community consensus. -- The Anome (talk) 14:40, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Now, when I visit a geographical article with no coordinates, I have to edit that article to see whether or not {{coord missing}} has been applied - it usually has, and so my time has been wasted. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 16:39, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, its really annoying: visible coord missing tags greatly streamlined the process. -- The Anome (talk) 16:59, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Streamlined what process? It just creates *another* tag for editors like myself to have to remove when we're sweeping through a collection of mostly incorrect coords added by random editors because they don't understand how to obtain the proper ones. I think my AWB script had about 14 parameters at one point. Orderinchaos 22:18, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

There's a box in your preferences that will show hidden categories. Then instead of looking at the top of the article to see if the tag is present look at the bottom. §hep • ¡Talk to me! 04:41, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Thank you (it's under the Misc tab, BTW), but while that might solve the sub-issue for those familiar with this discussion, it still leaves the notification of missing coordinates hidden from most editors. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 10:07, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

I think we need to go to VP/P or somesuch case, and see if we can get consensus for a time limited experiment in which we reinstate the "Coords Missing - You can help!" message. Were we to ask for a month with a view to us measuring uptake, we might be able to convince the naysayers. However, IMO we'd need to be assured that we could produce some stats on the addition of coords to support the case for extensions of the month into subsequent months. I could put something together on those lines if there's some consensus that it's the right thing to do, and if - The Anome? - there any chance we can measure uptake. --Tagishsimon (talk) 10:52, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

To follow-up on #Progress, I've had a process running for about a week now to do hourly snapshots of all mainspace coordmissing uses. A simple tool to look at the statistics is at tools:~para/coordmissing. It only follows changes in links to the template for now, assuming that the tagging no longer has false positives. --Para (talk) 14:35, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

That's excellent, Para; thanks. I'm glad that we're tracking numbers. --Tagishsimon (talk) 18:02, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

Simple advice

This page is so technical no newbie would understand hoe to help. So I have added this to the top of the page (commented out till consensus is achieved.)

• For a village- use the centre of the earliest known settlement of that name.
• For military and industrial establishments use the main gate. (Castles, barracks, dockyards, car plants)
• For administrative districts- the head office.
• For linear features

• Rivers- the mouth
• Roads- either end
• Rail- where it joins the main line
• Canals- its lowest point

Over to you folks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by ClemRutter (talk • contribs)

Thanks for returning the discussion to building the encyclopedia! For villages, I'd recommend the centre of the current settlement, where one exists, since that's the most verifiable location. I agree with you completely about river mouths, although for tributaries I'd prefer a point just before the mouth for the least possible ambiguity. For rail and roads, I'd suggest that any point that is unambiguously on the feature should be OK; putting it on a terminal point raises the problem of ambiguity, because they do not have a clear direction defined. For canals, I don't know which is right. -- The Anome (talk) 16:04, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

I wrote a simple description of adding coordinates at User:EncMstr/Coord. For places which have one, the country's authoritative GNIS database should have an official location for every city/village/town/etc.

Anome, what does "just before the mouth" mean? Upstream or downstream? —EncMstr (talk) 16:34, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Just upstream from the point where the tributary joins the main river. Perhaps "mouth" is the wrong word in the context of tributaries. -- The Anome (talk) 17:00, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

For rivers, railways and such like, please see Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Linear. Thank you. Note also that "either end" will not work where a user needs to add a single set of coordinates to an article, to have it included in Google Maps and similar partner projects. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 16:37, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

OK, I will make it go live and edit in the changes. ClemRutter (talk) 19:17, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

"Canals- its lowest point"

Lowest point? Isn't highest point, or some other point in the middle better? With an appropriate scale so you see more-or-less the full extent when you click on a map link.

—WWoods (talk) 20:53, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

I am easy- the problem I see is that a canal has one lowest point- but the highest sector of the canal is a linear section. See Huddersfield Narrow Canal where the highest sector is between Lock 32W and 42E and includes the entire Standedge Tunnel 53.5658N,1.9963W to 53.6030N,1.9307W. Selecting a random point in this 5km top section is easier than referring to a map to find which end is lower (here very difficult), but not a single point so is ambiguous. In this case most of the highest points are under ground so cannot be seen on Google maps.

I am attracted to the lowest point- because that is what we would plot for a river, and this can be used for water bodies such as reservoirs, natural lakes, glaciers- so would be entirely consistent- simple rule: if it is wet, tag the lowest point.

ClemRutter (talk) 22:19, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Actually, due to the use of locks the lowest point on a canal could be anywhere, not only on one end. Just identify it somewhere. -- SEWilco (talk) 03:14, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Like Wwoods, I think coordinates should be around the geometric centre of a feature. I'm not sure what the main use of Wikipedia coordinates is, but I'm thinking of readers clicking on them and getting a map or similar view of the feature, and map services having placemarks around the centre as well. There are many exceptions of course, but I don't think newbies need to be aware of that, especially as the sources used for coordinates on Wikipedia aren't in line with the advice and current hotspots vary. Which way should we try developing these things to, focusing map views or having a Wikipedia defined set of rules? In either case, "official" sources around the world will be different from what we end up on. --Para (talk) 23:00, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

The reasoning varies depending on the type of feature. For instance, the "mid-point" of a river varies if it has different sources at different times of year. Clearly, that's less of an issue with a road or railway. For such very long, yet narrow features, it may simply not be meaningful to have a single set of coordinates. Perhaps, in such cases {{kml}} should also generate a "map of all points" link in the title bar? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:07, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

I made this edit to remove some of Clem's new material, because we don't yet have a policy on how to add coordinates for linear features. Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Linear is an attempt to formulate policy where everyone, including Clem, is welcome to contribute. Some of the discussion in this section might be better at that page's talk page.Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:34, 15 October 2008 (UTC)

Andy- at 16:38 it looked like we had consensus. I am very aware that a lot of pages now have the {{coord missing}} and these refer editors back to this page. To be frank this page is for 'us' and not for 'them', but we have a Simple guide. It has a template explaining the format- and with my edit, some simple advice on what to tag. My edit was proposed in the talk page, and then rewritten to include all suggested changes and your suggestion to visit Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Linear. In future I would prefer that links were directed to a page with more user specific advice- rather than developer specific advice- but that is the future. Yes I have left comments on the talk page at /Linear. So looking at the draft recommentation at 17:00- they were

Draft recommendations
feature 	main coordinate 	further recommended coordinates 	optional   additions
bridge 	center 	both ends 	features crossed, support pillars
canal 	center 	both ends 	junctions, wharves, crossings, locks
railway 		both ends 	
river 	estuary/mouth 	source, major confluences 	crossings, other confluences,  boundaries crossed, weirs, major changes in direction
road 		both ends 	
tunnel 	center 	both portals 	ventilation shafts

For very short features (e.g. a small bridge) just the mid-point will suffice; for very long features, only major points of interest should be included.

And the simple advice was:

• Rivers- the mouth, or where it flows into another river. *Paraphrase*
• Roads- choose one end, usually the major road. *Not given- suggested both ends so I added one
• Rail- where it joins the main line. *Not given- suggested both ends so I added one
• Canals- its lowest point. *Not given- so I added one- discussion continued
• Tunnels, bridges etc, choose the midpoint. *Paraphrase*

Since 22:00 the draft recommendations have changed and become inconsistent. And I notice the comments I made on the talk page have not been addressed. No matter the discussion is moving on -and I stick to my points.

1. Users need Simple Advice and that needs to be published now, as the bot is tagging articles
2. The tagging should be easy to do and consistent

In IMHO (as stated on both talk pages) ends are unique and are easier to do find than the hypothetical middle- but the accepted middle should be stated as text in the article. I just do not see how I can find (with 7m accuracy) the middle of a wiggly line several thousand of km long. ClemRutter (talk) 00:06, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Why would you want 7m accuracy on a several thousand km long feature? That's a straw-man argument, unless I've missed something. Could we possibly figure out the recommendations on linear features in Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Linear by discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Linear, rather than here; including advice on what "middle" means in accuracy terms.

In the mean time, I'm happy that the Quick How To advice points to Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Linear, but would not object to a longform explanation of the sort you had, so long as it is consistent with and derived from the recommendations in Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Linear. Indeed I'd encourage it. --Tagishsimon (talk) 00:22, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

7m accuracy is what the user will be encouraged to use if tagging images in Commons. I wouldn't call it a Straw Man argument- more a caffeine induced argument! Yes the Quick How to- on the /Linear page seems like an excellent idea. Would it better to write it as a template that could be transcluded onto both pages, and thus stop all inconsistencies. To me the imperative is not putting off the user who follows the link from the {{coord missing}} it is this that has introduces the urgency.ClemRutter (talk) 10:01, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

For rivers I suggest: at the mouth, before the mouth, or before a delta. I'm avoiding saying "where it is a single flow" because some rivers have terrible form. -- SEWilco (talk) 03:14, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Absolutely- River Teise- bifurcates and drains into two rivers. But the lower end is easier to define than wading through the multiple tributaries, each of which could claim to be the source depending on raindall patterns.ClemRutter (talk) 10:01, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

A fair number of canals (Morris Canal, Main Line of Public Works) go up and back down; one end is lower but there are two locally-lowest points. Preferably we would have a list of locks and give the coordinates of each plus each end. --NE2 04:02, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Maybe I am playing devils advocate here, as it is difficult to determine which end is lower in an urban area. But we have at least narrowed it down to two points rather than an infinity of points along the top section. To take my own test example Huddersfield Narrow Canal, at one end we have the Dukinfield Basin- though it is not called that by locals and technically it is not the start, at the other end it joins the Huddersfield Broad Canal there is no junction just a change of width so start point uncertain, the most prominent feature is the 5km 17000ft Standedge Tunnel which is at the highest point and possible the middle, so if you follow the existing coordinates on Google maps, you see a patch of moorland 200m above where the tunnel may be. So the question is- what simple sentence do you use to describe the one point (principal coord). Any point is better than no point- but to keep it simple all canals have one lowest point, but if we tag the wrong end it is hardly critical because we will want to refer to all prominent points in the text of the article ClemRutter (talk) 10:01, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

←Clem: I don't think there was consensus. My suggestion to visit Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Linear was addressed at you, so that you would realise that there was already ongoing discussion; not so that you could include that suggestion in the guidelines. I'm sorry of that wasn't clear enough. I don't think that the current draft guidelines are inconsistent; though they are draft, and this liable to change, and you are welcome to suggest improvements. While you argue that Users need Simple Advice and that needs to be published now,, this cannot be done for linnear features, because there is not yet an agreed way to mark up their coordinates, much less their "main" coordinates. You say that comments [you] made on the talk page have not been addressed; those comments were made ~12 hours ago: I'm sure someone will address them,. but please note that there is no duty on volunteer editors to do so by an arbitrary, short deadline. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 08:08, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

No offence taken. My point is that the bot is loose, and multiple pages on my watch list have been tagged and usually they are on pages that are difficult to tag. All sorts of folk will be following the link, looking for simple advice and these pages don't give it. If the imperative is to get a tag onto these pages, it is better to get one that we can move later than to leave it floating. Have you seen the articles that are being brought over from pl.wiki?

Tagishsimon has come up with a suggestion to add Quick How To advice points to Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Linear that seems to a good idea and I think a template that could be transcluded to both pages could be a step further. ClemRutter (talk) 10:01, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Mmm. Not quite sure that that was my meaning. I think my points were: 1. discuss linear feature geocoding in the right place, not here 2. if you wish, reflect whatever advice prevails on the linear page, in the quick how to page. I have no strong opinion on whether that should be a manual step or through transclusion. 3. That there's no drop-dead imperative to amend the how to at this point, since readers are pointed to the linear page for discussion of linear features ... 4. but I do favour all major advice being conveyed to users on a single page where possible, so improvements are always desirable. --Tagishsimon (talk) 11:45, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Clem: "I just do not see how I can find (with 7m accuracy) the middle of a wiggly line several thousand of km long.

... so if you follow the existing coordinates on Google maps, you see a patch of moorland 200m above where the tunnel may be."

I don't think there's any need to find the exact midpoint along a linear feature, though coordinates should be accurate enough to put the map pointer on the feature, so that the user can identify it and follow it. For the same reason, I think the chosen point should be on an above-ground section — if you find yourself looking at a patch of moorland when you expected to see a canal, you don't know what's wrong.

I tried {{GeoGroupTemplate}} on the Rhine–Main–Danube Canal article (diff). It seems to work pretty well for marking the course of a linear feature, though it only links to GoogleMaps. I moved the 'title' position to about where the canal crosses the European Watershed; it seemed a reasonable 'high point', though of course the water level is the same from lock to lock.

—WWoods (talk) 15:01, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

I have kept quiet today- until now. I have posted an alternative set of suggestion on the /Linear page and suggest we take all of this debate over there. My intention in starting this thread was to make it easier for 'readers' to fulfil the request in {{coord missing}}. I am far happier to do something practical to make {{coord missing}} workable than take part in the splendid cat fight that is going on above. So can I ask for a few positive suggestions for what we can publish immediately in Quick How To advice points to Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Linear or in my commented out section on the project page.

ClemRutter (talk) 23:10, 16 October 2008 (UTC) ( I am on a wikibreak this weekend)

Notability of geographic locations

I've just found Wikipedia:Notability (Geographic locations), created in January 2008, which I've not seen mentioned here previously. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 14:25, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

A dead end, nothing to mention, really. NVO (talk) 20:15, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

I think the de-facto policy we have ended up using is that presence in the GNS and similar databases is a rebuttable presumption of notability; stubs can be created solely on that basis, but if they cannot later be found in a search of more authoritative source, they can then be deleted. -- The Anome (talk) 10:38, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Why does it say MW GIS extension is required, but not available?

On the front page (here), it says:

To define a geographical point, the Mediawiki gis extension is required. For further information, see the Mediawiki documentation.

NOTE: This extension is available, but is currently not enabled for Wikipedia. The functionality is thus currently only available via the {{coord}} template:

One could say this is self-contradictory, but I think I understand how it might have come to be that way: It's for documenting non-Wikimedia wikis, right? Maybe it should be moved elsewhere, not on that page? —EncMstr (talk) 22:53, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Since no one responded, I've removed the text—which was included twice! I also took the opportunity to organize, clarify, and focus the text, and provided a thousand words example. —EncMstr (talk) 19:15, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

fixing WikiMiniAtlas errors

I was just looking through Alabama, because it was the first page linked from the Coordinates template, and clicked on the WikiMiniAtlas icon (whatever the blue marble is called). The only 'non-geographic article' on the map, Nigger, was linked at the bottom left. I don't know how something comes to be included in the atlas, so I don't know how remove it. Given the random way I found it, I suspect there is a much wider problem. How do I fix something like this? cygnis insignis 16:42, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

Interesting - an earlier version has coords for Wilkinson point, and these might have been taken as coords for the pagename. Any change to a coordinate can take weeks to be reflected in Google Earth - I expect the miniAtlas is similar. Occuli (talk) 18:09, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

It would have been a courtesy to mention the ANI on this matter. Occuli (talk) 13:11, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

I was going to link it, but you were the only respondent and you posted there. I posted in a number of places when trying to work out how to fix it. I linked this section from AN/I, I don't want the discussion to become fragmented or stray off topic. Can anybody answer my question? cygnis insignis 14:15, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

The archived AN/I discussion is here. -- SEWilco (talk) 19:08, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

This comes down to best practices for using Wikipedia's coordinate data, especially with inline coordinates. Should they be plotted on maps along with the coordinates for articles? Should they use the inline name if given, and show it instead or in addition to the article name? And finally, what all should articles be giving inline coordinates for? With coordinates for the articles themselves the answer comes from article notability, but we haven't really considered how far we want to take coordinates within the articles. --Para (talk) 13:22, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

My understanding from the discussions about coord in 2007 was that the coordinate was only harvested if it was 'display=title' (or in an infobox?). I think this is how it should be - otherwise the same point could be mentioned inline in many articles with slightly (or very) different coords and then appear multiple times on maps. (This example was 'coor d' inline.) Occuli (talk) 13:31, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

(ec)How is this related to the discussion? The article has nothing to do with geography; unless it is a freakish coincincidence, it may be part of an act of vandalism. How do I fix this, other than removing the link as I did at Alabama, and how do I find if there are more instances of this? cygnis insignis 14:15, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

In March 2006, User:Muffuletta added to the article the coordinates of Wilkinson Point, which earlier used to be called Free Negro Point or Free Nigger Point [158]. This earlier name is why the point is mentioned in the article. Most reusers of Wikipedia's coordinate data rely on database dumps, which have been coming out only a couple of times a year. If the expected couple of months is too late to update the deleted coordinates, the administrators of each service will have to do manual operations for separate updating (at Google or WikiMiniAtlas or any of the other services using Wikipedia data). --Para (talk) 14:45, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

The offending point is also named on Google Earth - go to Baton Rouge and look for a 90 degree bend in the river. Occuli (talk) 14:08, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

I assume you mean this, but the point is called "Free Negro Point Crevasse".--Curtis Clark (talk) 15:31, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

If you select wikipedia under the 'more' option you will see a wikipedia icon which links to the article Nigger. Occuli (talk) 15:46, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

I came here from AN/I. I've been poking at the situation, and I'd like to summarize what I think are the issues.

1. At least at one point, and perhaps currently, the bot harvests coordinates wherever they occur in the article. Occuli seems to think this is not the correct procedure, and I agree, for the reasons given.
2. When the bot harvests coordinates, it applies the article name. Algorithmically, it could hardly do otherwise; there's no simple way to figure out which inline string corresponds to an inline coordinate.
3. The coordinates existed in the article until 2008-09-30, less than three weeks ago, so the latency of the system might not be all that great.
4. The point of it being "Nigger" is that Cygnis insignis might never have noticed it otherwise; the combination of the offensive word and the region stands out more than many other mistakes would.
5. If it is vandalism, it is the result of the vandal understanding the way the bot deals with inline coordinates. William of Ockham would say it's not vandalism.

It seems to me that the bot is broken, that it should not harvest inline coordinates. A solution would be to fix the bot, and force it to run if it runs only infrequently, and all the associated problems (only one of which was noticed) will be solved.--Curtis Clark (talk) 15:31, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Admirably put. I agree with all these points, except that one would like the bot to run more frequently to correct errors. (I think the latency of google noting newly added points was up to 5 or 6 weeks in 2007.) Occuli (talk) 15:59, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

On point 2: There are currently about 100,000 instances of {{coord|...|name=foo}}, though most of them are probably in huge list articles. On point 3: It would be possible to make the WikiMiniAtlas update more frequently by using the database table of external links, but the problem is that a link created from inline coordinates cannot be differentiated from title coordinate links. How about making the coord template add a dummy parameter to links? Would that information be useful somewhere else, too? Unfortunately none of this latency reduction is available to external services such as Google, unless they choose to trust some yet-to-be-created toolserver service. One possibility to suggest to them might be a feedback form that automatically refreshes a single article in their database with current Wikipedia data, with a few recurring updates afterwards to weed out possible refreshes made right after vandalism. --Para (talk) 16:26, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

So would it be reasonable to expect the bot to harvest only those coordinates that are display=title, name=something, or in an infobox (I'm not sure how the latter would be indicated)?--Curtis Clark (talk) 00:01, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Yes, it would, though they wouldn't be able to tell the difference between an unnamed inline link and a title link if they're parsing from the list of external links. Anyone is however free to use Wikipedia data as they wish, and some reusers may want to get the most available data wherever a location has been mentioned. There are some guidelines at Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates#Tools and applications based on coordinates from Wikipedia. It may need some revising, with perhaps a note on the non-notability on some of our data? None of the well known reusers Google Maps, Multimap.com, GeoNames or WikiMiniAtlas seem to be predictable at the moment, and I can't think of any other way for us to solve issues in external services than to write instructions ourselves and then pointing at those best practices. --Para (talk) 10:01, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

I indeed already wrote a script that extracts the coordinates from the external links table. However, so far I relied on the extraction work of [:de:Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Georeferenzierung/Wikipedia-World/en]] as those guys also evaluate interwikilinks. However with the efforts of The Anome, this should not be necessary any longer. So if you add the dummy parameter I can update WMA way more frequently. --Dschwen 12:52, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

If you're not supposed to use the coordinate template to insert coordinates of something mentioned in an article, how does one do it? --NE2 06:53, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

You can use it, but use the parameters display=inline and name=Whateveritisyouregeocoding. And then a little help extracting the coordinates would be appreciated (add the title/inline information to the geohack url!). --Dschwen 13:55, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

or display=inline|name=Whateveritisyouregeocoding is you want to follow {{coord}} documentation. --Tagishsimon (talk) 15:53, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Displaying inline is the default, so you don't really need that part.

—WWoods (talk) 17:38, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

If we change coord to have that information in the url, it won't help separating between inline coordinates and the coord template given in an infobox. Some infoboxes don't have much content at the top of the infobox before the coordinates, and coordinates in both the title and the infobox are seen as unnecessary repetition. It would be a bigger loss not to map articles with an infobox than to continue having some less notable coordinates on the map. How about starting to make sure that all inline coordinates are named, so that those without a name can then be assumed to come from the title or an infobox? --Para (talk) 17:56, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

As I've pointed out more than once before, naming coordinates suing the "name" parameter of {{coord}} (which I assume is the method you're proposing) is harmful in some of not all circumstances. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 18:04, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

{{coord missing}} outreach

As promised, I'm starting on the process of outreach to Wikiprojects, and I've produced some experimental reconciliations of missing-coordinate articles with WikiProjects. There are about 400 such WikiProjects, of which 200 or so are "easy" with 20 or fewer relevant articles, making about 1000 articles in total, and the rest are "hard", with hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of articles. See User:The_Anome/coord_missing_Wikiproject_breakdown for a breakdown.

Now two things are needed: a boilerplate message for an announcement to a WikiProject, and a very simple HOWTO page that they can be directed to in order to see how to make the updates and replace the {{coord missing}} tag with a {{coord}} tag. Once this is ready, we can move on to the first stage of the outreach process.

This is a big project: if we get this right, we can get literally thousands of people actively geocoding articles, across hundreds of WikiProjects. I'd like to start with the smallest projects first, so we can learn what does and does not work early on, before we work our way up to larger projects.

I've now written Wikipedia:Geocoding how-to for WikiProject members, aimed at members of other WikiProjects with no prior knowledge of coordinate tags or geocoding, intended to be linked from WikiProject solicitations. Would anyone like to review it? -- The Anome (talk) 17:00, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Update: I've now added a trial solicitation at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Video games. Let's see what happens. -- The Anome (talk) 18:40, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

The note is good, but what do we do for wikiprojects with 1000+ articles? Should we link to the category? Note: I got the coordinates for the Joypolis article...my bad, if this was suppose to see what happens. Spencer^T♦C 20:17, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

For those, we will have to do something altogether more complex, probably involving Wikipedia:CatScan. I'd like to get some practice with the smaller cases, before going on to the larger projects. -- The Anome (talk) 21:36, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Update: I've now seeded Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Benin and Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Zimbabwe. Would anyone like to try seeding the relevant country WikiProjects for some other countries with less than 200 pending articles? -- The Anome (talk) 21:59, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

I've done this for Malawi, pp the Anome. (One problem is that some of Malawi is not visible in Google maps.) Occuli (talk) 22:23, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. -- The Anome (talk) 22:26, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

I'll do some seeding right now. Spencer^T♦C 01:19, 20 October 2008 (UTC) Done for Wikiproject Democratic Republic of the Congo, Wikiproject Iraq, and Wikiproject Paraguay. Spencer^T♦C 01:34, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Would there be any objection to me spltting off the Derbyshire ones from the UK category? I see that all I have to do is change {{coord missing|United Kingdom}} to {{coord missing|Derbyshire}} and create the category as a subcat. (Using AWB, which tells me there are 140 such.) Occuli (talk) 08:12, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

I've done this - there is now Category:Derbyshire articles missing geocoordinate data (bypassing catscan, which seems very slow today). And I had already alerted WikiProject Derbyshire. And now also done for WikiProject Sheffield. Occuli (talk) 09:22, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Done for WikiProject UK Waterways and WikiProject West Midlands. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 11:55, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Geof Sheppard makes a good point: "or better still, [replace {{coord missing}}] with coordinates in the 'latitude' and 'longitude' parameters of the station infobox" . Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 14:56, 20 October 2008 (UTC)

Added outreach for Wikipedia:WikiProject North East England --Tagishsimon (talk) 07:56, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Outreached

For a list of wikiprojects to which we have posted geo-coord outreach, see Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/outreach

Thanks for moving that! —EncMstr (talk) 20:41, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Category nesting issue

Why am I not seeing Category:Derbyshire articles missing geocoordinate data listed as a category of Category:United Kingdom articles missing geocoordinate data? ==Tagishsimon (talk) 22:58, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

It's a hidden category. Spencer^T♦C 23:06, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

We risk losing track of categories as they're spawned off Category:United Kingdom articles missing geocoordinate data into "by county" hidden categories. Oddly, Category:Derbyshire articles missing geocoordinate data does list its membership of the equally hidden Category:United Kingdom articles missing geocoordinate data. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:15, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Look in "To display all subcategories click on the "+":" at the top of any page, or look on the page for Ds or re-sort the subcats. Occuli (talk) 00:26, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. --Tagishsimon (talk) 18:30, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

No, it's because it's sorted under D. The way to fix this is to use a sortkey of " Derbyshire". --NE2 06:44, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Outreach boilerplate text

I've put a version of the current text I've been using to request help from other projects into Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/outreach solicitation sandbox. I'd greatly appreciate any improvements you can make. -- The Anome (talk) 18:51, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Help with coordinates for Thomas Avery House

After successfully finding coordinates for the first 250 or so places I've attempted, I've finally gotten stumped on one of them. Thomas Avery House is at 33 Society Rd, East Lyme, CT, but that address is ambiguous enough that it could be one of several buildings. Photos from that page's two externally linked web sites add to the confusion, since none of the buildings seem to match aerial photos – road surfaces are wrong or buildings aren't placed where I'd expect. Any ideas? Travisl (talk) 21:27, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Check out the Bird's eye imagery on Live Maps, west from the soccer field. Seems to match with the images in the article. --Para (talk) 21:43, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

You could try asking on relevant talk pages like Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Connecticut and Talk:East Lyme, Connecticut, where you might find someone with local knowledge. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:45, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Para has it. I've tagged it, though you might be able to get the pointer slightly more central if you want to fiddle. 250 attempted and only one stumper: good going. --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:59, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Very nice. I must've spent half an hour today scouring the wrong side of the road. Had no inkling that it'd be north of the main road. Tweaked the coords slightly to center on the roof of the house. Thanks. Travisl (talk) 04:29, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Well, now look what you've done! Nobody will be able to reach it up there without a ladder, and it's going to stain the roof after the next rain. -- SEWilco (talk) 05:17, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Lack of precision

I've expressed concern about the lack of precision that is apparently being recommended at WP:Geocoding how-to for WikiProject members, on its talk page and have been sent here. My concern arises from the inaccuracies in the positioning of markers in the Wikipedia layer on Google Earth (inter alia) when small places (villages, headlands, churches etc.) are only geo-tagged to the nearest arc-minute, or .01 degree. I'd appreciate clarification of the level of precision that should be used when geo-tagging these small places.  —SMALLJIM  22:53, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

As I read it, the WP:Geocoding how-to for WikiProject members page does not give advice on precision, but merely cautions that one should not be over precise, with a link to Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates#Precision. That page makes no recommendation which would lead to a person siting Lynmouth in a field a mile to the south. However the examples on the how-to page did not show seconds, and/or went to only 1dp. I've amended the advice to show seconds and 2dp ... please let me know whether you think this is a sufficient change, or whether you have suggestions for further change. Per Andy's comment, I think this is the right place to discuss this issue; the how to page is a child page of this project, and we cannot guarantee that all project members will have it on their watchlists. Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates#Precision is our advice on precision - again, please let us have some feedback on whether you think it answers your call for advice. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:04, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

It's also worth noting that the coords in Degrees & Minutes were added on 13 February 2007 by User:The Anomebot2 and so do not arise out of advice given on WP:Geocoding how-to for WikiProject members. User:The Anomebot2 is a bot of this parish, and will presumably have used an external source of coords which was inaccurate. With luck, User:The Anome will happen along & provide some more background. --Tagishsimon (talk) 23:11, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the fast and comprehensive responses. Personally I'd remove the cautions against being over-precise altogether; being over-precise does far less harm than not being precise enough, with the current generation of mapping software anyway. And there are bound to be far more "small" geo-tagged locations than "large" ones.

I don't think it's inaccuracy, but the lack of a "precision" factor that is the problem. There would be no problem with specifying 51°13′N 3°49′W for Lynmouth if the software knew that it meant the bottom left hand corner of a rectangle of sides 1 arc-minute in length and that it should highlight that rectangle. But as it stands we're dumped in the middle of a field with no real idea of which way to turn; and as I already said, inaccurate Wikipedia markers like that won't do Wikipedia's reputation for accuracy any good.

Just a suggestion - maybe we should specify that any "small" features (defined as (say) less than 1 mile in diameter) should be geo-tagged to at least 1 sec or .001 deg.  —SMALLJIM  23:55, 22 October 2008 (UTC)

I always aim for 7m precision in my tagging (a hang over from working on Commons). There are times when I would like to tag , but knowing I can't achieve this precision I would like to tag but leave a warning that further precision is needed. The section above would be a good example. I was tentatively thinking of proposing a category Category:Geotag needs further precision which we could encourage readers to use- or maybe an attribute precision=needsattentionto {{coord}} or something similar could be done, to signal the concern. I am floating the idea- leaving the final mechanism to others to decide- we mustn't deter users by making life ridiculously complicated.

ClemRutter (talk) 09:20, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

When I get coordinates, I generally use as few significant figures as possible such that adding or subtracting 1 from the final digit still places the marker on the object, and then try to get as close to the center as possible. Is this a good way to do it? --NE2 06:43, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

That's almost exactly the way I do it. I find the point in the very rough center of the object with the least number of significant digits in the longitude and latitude. For rivers and streams, the object I'm aiming at the rough center of is the mouth. For buildings, I aim at the rough center of the roof. For settlements, the center of the town/village if it's easy to tell, or the spot with the highest concentration of roads. For bigger areas (townships; regions; large parks; city districts, neighborhoods, or wards; etc.), the rough center of that area. Bridges, tunnels, dams, traffic circles, as close as I can get to the true exact center. For open air malls, the central plaza, if its possible to tell, otherwise, the rough geographic center. Clear policy would be nice for those features that don't yet have clear policy, but I understand consensus takes time.

Some examples I've submitted: Texas blackland prairies, which is a large swath of land encompassing more than half the state, got coordinates of 32|-96. Tesla Fault, a thin linear feature, got 37.579|-121.564, roughly close to its center. Theatre Albany, a building, got 31.5781|-84.1595. Thomas Circle, a traffic circle with a statue in the center, got the top of the statue, at 38.90566|-77.03196.

Theodore Wirth Park was an interesting case. A park that was much taller north/south than its east/west width, I gave it differing significant digits: 44.99|-93.323. Travisl (talk) 18:34, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

Nearly-done countries challenge #1: Federated States of Micronesia, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu

This is the first of a series of daily challenges to clear out the last few remaining ungeocoded articles for small countries.

• All but two of the Federated States of Micronesia articles now appear to have coordinates; see Category:Federated States of Micronesia articles missing geocoordinate data.  Done

• All but two of the Tuvalu articles now appear to have coordinates; see Category:Tuvalu articles missing geocoordinate data.  Done

• All but four one of the Vanuatu articles now appear to have coordinates; see Category:Vanuatu articles missing geocoordinate data.  Done

Does anyone want to try to finish geocoding these three countries? -- The Anome (talk) 11:51, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

I've done two of the remaining three. All that's left is Lorevilko, which I suspect is the village at -15.3845,167.1688, based on hints at Mystery Worshipper, but I haven't been able to confirm. Travisl (talk) 06:08, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

I split the difference between Hog Harbour and Sara, based on the original article and a map I found showing both HH & Sara. At worst the unfortunate who uses a star trek transporter to get trhere based on my coords will have no more an a 1km walk... --Tagishsimon (talk)@

Finishing Luxembourg

I've been going through Category:Luxembourg articles missing geocoordinate data. If anyone wishes to help me finish this, that would be great. Spencer^T♦C 22:52, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

I've got Markusbierg Tunnel, via inspection of aerial photos, and I've also coded a couple of big regions. -- The Anome (talk) 12:06, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

I've now got it down to 4 entries, after tracking down a couple of minor football stadia. Any takers for the remaining 4? -- The Anome (talk) 14:10, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks to everyone, I got the last one. It started out with at least 70, so nice job. Spencer^T♦C 19:59, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Accuracy

I happened to check the box marked More:Wikipedia on Maps.Google to see info about areas that I was viewing. So I went over to central Kazakhstan, and there happened to be an article in a quite remote area. That article turned out to be Makunudhoo (Kaafu Atoll) (In the Maldives). Perhaps easy and random coordinate checks can be performed by looking through Maps.Google and seeing if the coordinates at least make sense, like this one didn't. Spencer^T♦C 00:26, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Spotting gross errors like this is on my to-do list. I'm working on a country-area classifier that can then be used to spot outliers like this, that assigns possible country classifications to one-degree squares using the NGA GNS data. It's not quite as easy as it sounds: there's lots of fun to be had with roundoff errors, wrapround, enclaves, exclaves, and extraterritorial possessions, and of course errors in the data being used to build the classifier itself. -- The Anome (talk) 13:38, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

When Google Map's photos doesn't match its map overlay — e.g. here the roads on the map are ~30m to the east of roads on the picture — which should I believe? Should the discrepancy be noted somehow?
—WWoods (talk) 15:42, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

I'd be incined to use the photo's but I could wrong. Perhaps pick one and then see where it places the location on other map systems e.g MS Local Live Talltim (talk) 16:00, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

I'd cross check with other maps than google. Doing so for 49°36′43.20″N 6°7′44.40″E gives us, for instance, google versus microsoft, after inspection of which the consensus would be that it is google's photo which is out of whack; the two maps and the MS aerial photo all seem to tally. And by using preview, you can extend your check to Yahoo or any other toolserved map resources. (Oops - which is exactly what Talltim said) --Tagishsimon (talk) 01:19, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

anyone want to double check me?

I've started doing some coordinate tagging, but since I'm new to this, I figured I'd ask for someone else to double check me and make sure I'm doing this correctly. I'm basically looking for buildings and landmarks I know, finding them in wikimapia, and copying the URL into the coordinate template. Here's a sample of some that I've done:

• 2000 Pennsylvania ave
• 1101 New York ave
• 1620 L st
• 1333 H st
• Ambassador Theater
• Charles E. Smith center
• Cira Centre

thanks in advance. --Bachrach44 (talk) 14:15, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

My three main bits of feedback would be:

• Too many decimal points. See Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geographical_coordinates#Precision. Your 7 decimal places equates to an error of +/1 1.1cm, which is way too detailed for a building, which can probably cope with just 4 or 5DP.
• You're not adding a type:landmark parameter, nor a region:US ... which is fine, they're optional, but they're somewhat useful. You can acquaint yourself with these at Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geographical_coordinates#Implementation_details, though it may be as easy to see an example: something like this.
• It's your responsibility to check that the coords are accurate. Wikimapia is not always spot-on. It's always worth trying to do a reality check, especially by doing a preview and checking what the coordinates look like on Google, Yahoo or LiveSearch. For towns, lakes, roads &c., this is normally quite easy. For a building, more difficult since you have to know whether the building being pointed to is 20 Fenchurch street, or 22...

But in the main - thanks for joining us. There are only another 100,000 articles marked as needing coordinates, so act fast lest they run out :) --Tagishsimon (talk) 16:28, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your advice. I'll try to add some other parameters. Regarding the precision though, one thing confuses me. If you put in lat=37.345, then it seems that the mapping software all just assumes you mean 37.3450000. Since this seems to be the case, when we put in only, say, 4 significant digits, we're really putting in 7 anyway, so why not just be precise and put in the right 7 digits instead of 37.3450000? --Bachrach44 (talk) 20:35, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Consider what alternative the mapping software has: it says show 37.3, so it can't show 37.4 nor 37.2. It has to show 37.3 which is mathematically the same as 37.3000000000.... The accuracy is for humans to understand how much panning/zooming/leeway is expected of the location. The United states is at—say—40 N 115 W. Ideally, this should be written something like 40±15 N 115±30 W (or whatever). That's what the precision is trying to communicate. Conversely, great precision is needed to locate Mill Ends Park since it is barely 61 cm in diameter.... —EncMstr (talk) 20:47, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Replying to Bachrach44's 20:35 posting, I'd say someone per EcnMstr that there are few structures for which it is appropriate to specify the coordinates down to centimeters. From the perspective of human usability, decimals with many DP are simply harder to read - to parse. Finally, and YMMV, after starting with decimals, I've switched to inputting coordinates as DMS, which tends to dispense with worries about DP - yes, you can put in a decimal amount of seconds, but there's no driver to do that comparable with your 7dp decimal driver. --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:44, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

I understand the general theory of why too much precision is bad/unnecessary. My question is more about our specific implementation. EncMstr makes a very good point about there needing to be a range on a location, the problem is that we don't have one. If when we put in 37.45 it assumed that the location was 37.45 +/- .01, then it would make sense, but we don't. When you click on the location you get a marker which assumes the location to be 37.4500000. There is no difference between specifying 7 DP of accuracy and specifying 2 (that I can see at least - if there's something that I'm not aware of please correct me). That all being said I will start paying more attention to using the correct level of accuracy (because I'm good at following the rules like that ;-)), even if I don't see what difference it makes. --Bachrach44 (talk) 02:04, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

"There is no difference between specifying 7 DP of accuracy and specifying 2" except that humans can read 2 dp with ease and glaze over at 7dp. (But 7dp is better than no coordinate whatsoever!) --Tagishsimon (talk) 13:19, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Nearly done countries challenge #2

A slightly more ambitions tagging challenge which recognises the enormous input of a certain project member; please put your weight behind the following, thanks --Tagishsimon (talk) 18:02, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

• 7 missing coords for Antarctica Done
• 5 2 1 missing coord for North Korea
• 34 26 21 15 3 missing coords for Oman Done
• 7 missing coords for Monaco Done
• 1 missing coords for East Timor Done

Monaco compeleted. Spencer^T♦C 20:46, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

Antarctica completed. -- The Anome (talk) 02:07, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

East Timor completed. Travisl (talk) 06:00, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

North Korea now down to 2. Several of the places are in the Joint Security Zone, so I just used its coordinates. For cities, I used centres of bounding boxes from the Korean encylopedia articles linked from the articles (see edit comments for details): I'm not sure about accuracy, but it's hard to find online sources for these. -- The Anome (talk) 13:07, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

Update: Yahoo! Maps, which does have some data for North Korea, confirms that Songrim is spot on, but shows Sinpo as about 20km off, but does not facilitate discovering the correct coordinates. -- The Anome (talk) 13:14, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

I've asked the photographer of the monument in Bukgwan Victory Monument (ko.wikipedia) if he can help with its coordinates. News reports place it in two different provinces, after it left Tokyo and Seoul. Travisl (talk) 19:03, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

I got Pyongsong. 1 left. Spencer^T♦C 21:29, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

No luck on Bukgwan Victory Monument. The photographer says the photo of the monument in ko.wikipedia is of a replica in Gyeongbokgung, South Korea. I'm at a dead end. Travisl (talk) 22:00, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

A little more information. The Bukgwan Victory Monument is "erected on a low hill in Rimmyong-ri (림명리), Kimchaek City, North Hamgyong Province. The survey group in the course of the excavation made on the basis of sufficient documents discovered a pedestal on a hill about 300 meters east of the Rimmyong-ri seat". [159] After it was removed in 1905, it was "placed in its original spot" in 2006. [160] Kim Jong Il personally inspected it May 17, 208. [161]. Still, that's not enough information for me to pinpoint it. Travisl (talk) 00:13, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

For Oman articles, searching for the Arabic name in Google Earth seems to yield good results. Travisl (talk) 22:51, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Can a bot get coords from interwikis?

Just a thought - a lot of locations in non-English speaking countries may have coordinates in their native language's wiki entry. Can a bot be made that could go through the interwiki links of the articles with no coordinates and try to grab the coord data? It might save us all a lot of time on international entries. --Bachrach44 (talk) 02:13, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

It can be, and has been, done. It's run every couple of months. -- The Anome (talk) 10:24, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Okay, awesome --Bachrach44 (talk) 20:59, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

User prefernces for display of coordinates

Please note that I have created {{UF-coord-classes}}, to contain explanatory text on how to set the display (Decimal vs. DMS) of coordinates, and allow its use on several pages (some of which had it already). Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:47, 3 November 2008 (UTC)

Obtaining Coordinates

So far I have seen that http://atlas.mapquest.com/maps/latlong.adp is a reliable source for obtaining geo coordinates. Where do I request that this be "checked-out" to be used as a way to obtain geographic coordinates?

⊥m93 ^talk. 14:14, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

I think you've done it. Now be bold and add the source. It's not heavily policed. I confess, having tried it, that I cannot immediately see where it delivers coords from an input such as an address, so you might want to provide that advice. --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:42, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Nearly done countries challenge #3

Here's tonight's homework; geo-code the following:

• 1 article needs coords in Macedonia Done Adam was found at "the Neolithic site of Cerje near the village of Govrlevo, Skopje area", and now lives at Museum of the City of Skopje, according to [162]. Presumably we want coords for the second, although we might pause and ask if we want to mark up a movable object? --Tagishsimon(talk) 18:36, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

I've used the coordinates of the museum. If it's a frequently moved object, then perhaps it shouldn't get a fixed set of coordinates, but I don't think we want to go to the other extreme, either, neglecting to add coordinates to objects in their home location which might get moved someday. Travisl (talk) 18:59, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

• 3 articles need coords in Liechtenstein Done
• 3 articles need coords in Palau Done
• 6 articles need coords in The Marshall Islands Done
• 9 articles need coords in Grenada -  Done

thanks --Tagishsimon (talk) 18:28, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

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