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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)

We have millions of pages, it is not reasonable for someone to have to make millions of http requests just to extract the locations of all our pages. We provide dumps for this purpose but the vast number of possible geocoding templates makes extraction from the page data unreliable. The addition of this template as yet another way to code coordinates in articles just makes the problem worse, when with a few minor additions to the templates we could solve the issue completely. --Gmaxwell 18:02, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Other issues aside, it seems that the way you want things to work prioritises the convenience of data manipulators like Google over and above the convenience of editors and the convenience of individual end users. It strikes me that that's a bad thing, so I hope I've misunderstood you. I'd be grateful for clarification, please. (Also, is there a better place of all of these issues to be discussed, which will involve more of the people involved?) Andy Mabbett 22:07, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

... Can you please spell out your concern in detal? I don't follow, so hopefully more detail would help me understand. I haven't intentionally suggested anything that would cause difficulty for editors and, in fact, I think having fewer geocoding templates should make life easier on all of us. Google was invoked because I've spoken to them directly on this exact issue and people here seem to care about them.... But our internal data extracts are in the same boat, things like Wikiminiatlas also need a straightforward way to extract our geodata. Scanning every article via HTTP is completely unreasonable. --Gmaxwell 22:47, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

(outdent)

The new template is intended to be easier for editors to use; and provides more standardised output for the benefit of end users. It also provides a Geo microformat, again for the benefit of end users (I trust that we agree that these are all good things?). It replaces three other templates (and eventually six, or nine; I'd proposed bot-replacing all the coor family with "coord"), which satisfies your "fewer geocoding templates should make life easier on all of us" comment, with which I wholeheartedly agree. Doesn't that also make things easier for wikicode parsers? Don't Google scan our HTML anyway? I'm not clear why the new template is less satisfactory for the internal uses you mention. Andy Mabbett 23:04, 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 opportunity 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)

You may wish to see my prior post on our interface problems]. --Gmaxwell 18:02, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

To which . Andy Mabbett 21:37, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Sure enough, I missed it. :) Um, except they don't at all solve it for us. I realize that microformats are the current ultimate in buzzword compliance, but if implemented via templates they don't do anything to make our actual pages more machine readable. For example, how does coord's use of microformats help me write a bot that goes removes locations which are known to be incorrect or which adjusts the scale for georefs inside a given bounding box? .. We tell people who want to work with our data (including our own users) to use the dumps, but microformats transcluded via n-deep indirection are not helpful there.

Please note, I do strongly support us having microformats. My objections are that (1) we shouldn't change the project wide syntax without also addressing the other machine readability issues, and (2) we shouldn't break existing features (i.e. adjustable scale). Adding some simple modes to the coord template (one to adjust the title, one to output the lat, long in dec. deg. for use in other templates) would get us a lot of the way there. --Gmaxwell 22:06, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

(outdent)

When I said that they resolved problems, I was referring to machine readability of HTML pages; which they do assist. They won't help the machine readability unless they're added as discrete components in each page's wikicode - which is certainly do-able, but would require a lot of re-engineering elsewhere. I suppose that's a result of an organically-grown, rather than fully-spec'd, system. Still I'm glad that we;re finding at least some common ground. I don't know enough about the way templates are made to understand you last sentence (my understanding is of HTML and microformats); I hope Quarl will be here soon; or perhaps you can make the changes? Andy Mabbett 23:16, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Gah, it looks like we've just been having a misunderstanding. From the start I was only insisting that:

• We should replace tags rather that adding more. We can only do this if the new template covers the old features, which this doesn't yet. We can also only do this if we have an active consensus, not simply a failure to object. It might also be wise to contact the authors of some of the existing tools that use our geodata. I'm not aware of any existing browser features that use microformats ... but we have wikiminiatlast *today*. Doesn't mean we shouldn't provide microformats, but it does mean we shouldn't break the tools.
• We shouldn't make any wide scale geocoding template changes unless they resolve the outstanding issues of machine access.
• We can resolve these issues by some simple additions to the proposed new template, but these additions might break the proposed syntax, so we shouldn't roll until they are ironed out.

Now that you have my attention, I'd be glad to work with you and everyone else to get a solution which fixes everything. :)

"How am I supposted to know about discussion on a page whos existance I could not have known about?" - The issue was flagged up on this talk page, on this project's main page, on Template talk:Coor dms and on Misplaced Pages:Village pump (proposals). Andy Mabbett 21:33, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Where was it discussed here, I can't find it. I only look at VP once a week or so, the SNR is terrible. ::shrugs:: --Gmaxwell 22:06, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

What happened to the Parameters variable? - I think that the change to Template:coord should be reverted ASAP until the parameters can be included. The lack of the parameters variable means that the scale parameter is completely ignored, and maps are always requested at 1:300000. Theother parameters are not currently used by the geo-hack interface, but they probably will be used in the near future. Now users have no way of tagging what type of item is listed, what country it is in, or, most importantly, what scale it is. --Ozhiker 18:07, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

Sure enough it doesn't pass scale. Blah! I was hoping we could get away without reverting the rest of the changes. *sigh* --Gmaxwell 18:09, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

I have reverted the redirects to Template:Coord until we can fix the parameter issue. - jredmond 18:46, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

I've referred the matter to User:Quarl, who edited the templates (at my request). Hopefuly, we can find a speedy remedy that will satisfy everybody, and meet everybody's needs. Andy Mabbett 21:29, 2 April 2007 (UTC)

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

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

• Misplaced Pages pages with to-do lists