Talk:List of circles of latitude

List of circles of latitude is of interest to WikiProject Geographical coordinates, which encourages the use of geographical coordinates in Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.Geographical coordinatesWikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinatesTemplate:WikiProject Geographical coordinatesGeographical coordinates articles

Why?[edit]

This seems to be a pointless article. There is certainly no need for all of the maps! I suggest replacing it with a simple table that provides links to the 181 other articles. — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 12:11, 3 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Table conversion tips[edit]

To merge data from the individual lines of latitude, I use the follow regexp (using "search-and-replace" after copying the wikimarkup into Notepad++):

\|\-.*\r\n(\| *style\=\".+;\" *)?\| *([\{\[].+[\]\}]) *\r\n(\! *scope\=\".*\" *)?\| *([\{\[].+[\]\}]) *\r\n(\| *style\=\".+;\" *)?\| *(.*)\r\n

\2 \6, \4\<br \/\>

Search top line, replace with bottom line. Maybe a script to crawl each article would be easier, but one has to check each article individually anyway if they're doing something else weird.

Also, I removed any geographic feature that isn't exactly crossing the whole-number line of latitude, as well as features large enough to span several lines (> 200 km or so). SamuelRiv (talk) 00:42, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

SamuelRiv, there are a few things that need to be considered if this is going to be a proper list. As I mentioned at the Village Pump post about latitude and longitude, we should consider how to acknowledge the countries that each circle passes through. I get that some of them touch a lot of circles of latitude, but not mentioning them at all is a pretty big gap in coverage. Also, how are settlement crossings being counted? Alert, Nunavut, is listed under 82° north, but it's not actually on that circle of latitude, it's on 82°30'05" north. I wonder if we might be better off removing that column, especially when looking at more populated areas where there are hundreds of settlements on or around each circle. Thebiguglyalien (talk) 23:31, 29 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Google Maps binds Alert between 82.49 and 82.53, and the satellite view of actual structures is far smaller. Perhaps the number of towns proper that an integer line will actually cross may be smaller than you'd think -- if not then a simple regexp can easily delete the column once it gets unwieldy.

What will almost certainly get unwieldy is mentioning every country every time; it's also far less relevant than towns, since as pointed out in the thread, some towns put up markers for lines of latitude. (I don't think any of it's relevant to begin with -- the only time some non-astronomical latitude makes a difference is when people actually use it to make a legal difference -- on a border, say. But this is something of a compromise.) (If you really insist we can create a separate draft article that preserves the regexp output unmodified for content, asking people to contribute either unmodified content or both, then RfC on what people prefer.) SamuelRiv (talk) SamuelRiv (talk) 00:59, 30 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]