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Revision as of 17:53, 2 April 2007

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How should coordinates be formatted?

Please help with the discussion at Misplaced Pages:Peer review/Ridge Route; thank you. --NE2 01:04, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Reference geo coordinates from an article

With some wonderful code, wikipedia now churns out clickable location maps of countries which add a new degree of interactability to the wiki ex: Indian_Institutes_of_Management . But the process of marking each point using coordinates is tiring and cumbersome especially if something like a clickable road map is to be made.
It would be very useful if one could reference the coordinates from an article, like geo:London would return the geographical coordinates of London and mark it on the map. This can really unleash the power of location maps. Also posted on bugzilla here-- 16:40, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Template to request coords

I've created Template:LocateMe. Should it go on their talk pages (as in the few examples currently tagged) or on the articles themselves (like other clean-up tags, such as clean-up itself, or "uncited" and so on? For now, please start using it (and advocating its use) if appropriate - just type {{LocateMe|April 2007}} (or whatever month we're in after this one)) on talk pages. Andy Mabbett 23:33, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

FAQs?

As a newcomer to this project, might I suggest that the following questions go on the project page (or in a FAQ linked from it), with better answers than these "starters":

• Q: How precise should the coordinates be?
  • A: Only as precise as needed for the size of place or structure; for a city, for instance, two or three decimal places or the nearest whole minutes - no need for seconds.

• Q: The place is very big - what coordinates should I give?
  • A: For a building, the main entrance; for a city, the nominated centre point (e.g from which road distances are measured), if there is one, or the location of the main administration building (Town or City Hall, etc.); for a park or open space, the approximate centre.

Though the points are currently covered, they're not immediately apparent; and a "FAQ" format is more easily absorbed by first-time visitors.

Comments? Additions? Brickbats? Andy Mabbett 23:45, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

U.S. Roads

If we were to implement coordinates into the roads articles, how would we do it? --Rschen7754 (talk - contribs) 01:15, 1 April 2007 (UTC)

See Ridge Route. Andy Mabbett 14:24, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

request for a bot to apply "LocateMe"

Please note my request for a bot to apply "LocateMe" to articles about places, in need of coordinates. Andy Mabbett 09:54, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Suggestion: Add Coordinate Display Format into User Preferences

Did anything ever come of the May 2005 suggestion to add Coordinate Display Format into User Preferences? I'd be strongly in favour. Andy Mabbett 12:47, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

New template replaces "coor" family

Important! Please note that {{template:coord}} has just been made available. It replaces the existing "coor" family of templates (which now redirect to it); simplifies data entry; standardises display; and deploys a Geo microformat. {{template:coord title}} will follow shortly. Please advise fellow editors, and update documentation, accordingly. Please also notify this project of any coordinate-listing templates which do not include coord. Thank you. Andy Mabbett 13:48, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Greetings. Please be aware that when you make changes like this you break machine readability for other tools (like google earth). I'm not opposed to making changes, but our changes should be in the direction of consolidation, and I'm not sure that this change is going far enough in that direction. --Gmaxwell 14:06, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Google Earth - or anyone else - can now read the Geo microformat, regardless of what current or future template generates it; no need for it to try to parse numerous templates - and that's a great step towards "consolidation". This has been discussed for sometime; there have been plenty of chances for such issues to be raised. Andy Mabbett 14:37, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

If google spidered our webpages any faster we'd probably have to block them. ;) The microformats don't help people working off dumps, which is the preferred way to work with all of the data. I raised this issue months ago when we first setup google earth's import, and I really don't appreciate your dismissive response. --Gmaxwell 17:04, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

I didn't say anything about working faster - it's just working "smarter". Surely WP is primarily for people working off pages, not data dumps? Andy Mabbett 17:12, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Can we please capture the coord title functionality into this template? For example {{coord|latitude|longitude|display=title}}. The proliferation of geotemplates is making machine reading of wikitext very very hard to do well.--Gmaxwell 14:28, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

I suggest you raise the specific changes you request with User:Quarl. Again, microformats will greatly increase the machine-readability of articles; see Project Microformats Andy Mabbett 14:37, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Speaking from experience, *nothing* which comes in via transclusion is useful for machine readability of the Wikitext. If someone is working from the dumps they need a complete copy of the templates as well as a full Wikitext parser (um which means our horribly slow PHP one, since there is no other parser with complete template support) in order to use anything that comes out of templates. This is an unreasonable requirement.

I am reverting your changes to the instruction pages, we don't need yet another widespread uncoordinated breakage of machine readability unless it's going to actually solve some problems. --Gmaxwell 17:04, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

It *is * solving problems; and it is not "uncoordinated" - you have had plenty of oportnity to comment, while this was being discussed, on numerous talk and project pages. I've restored the changes. Please discuss as resolution before reverting again. Andy Mabbett 17:12, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

How am I supposted to know about discussion on a page whos existance I could not have known about. The changes were not discussed here as far as I know. Please don't make us look like idiots. I've spend a lot of time wearing the Wikimedia hat coordinating with reusers and researchers and making a part-way change to our wikitext format will just make our readability problems worse. I think the changes are a good step but we should make sure they address all the important issues and then mass push them across the project rather than making a part-way transisition which will leave yet another syntax that people have to support. --Gmaxwell 17:53, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Templates with coordinates, but not using {{tl:coord}}

• {{Template:Geolinks-buildingscale}}
• {{Template:Geolinks-cityscale}}
• {{Template:Geolinks-naturalfeature}}

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