Wikipedia:WikiProject National Register of Historic Places/Coordinates

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This is currently (August 2019) a new draft page to cover facts and issues about coordinates of NRHP-listed sites, consolidating from scattered discussions. There are proposed "best practices" about which there may not yet be consensus, so this page perhaps should be identified as a Wikipedia essay, at least if there is any serious disagreement.

A few of many previous discussions include:

Background summary: From the earliest days of WikiProject National Register of Historic Places, it has been understood by editors that coordinates information supplied from the National Park Service and elsewhere has often been wrong. There were errors placing sites out in the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans; all such egregious errors have been fixed in the system of county- and city-level list-articles of NRHP places. Also there was a systematic type of error due to the NAD83(?) change of coordinates systems, whereby places identified correctly in the old U.S. topographic map system became mislocated by 100 yards or more. Editors routinely made corrections of coordinates based on their better information, such as from their visiting the sites themselves and/or studying the NRHP nomination documents and photos, and comparing the NPS-supplied coordinate locations to actual locations visible in Google satellite view or similar. For other kinds of corrections, many (perhaps most) NRHP editors made notes in wp:NHL info issues and wp:NRIS info issues work pages, which has at least documented what we did, and, in some cases has led to the NPS making corrections of their data. But the coordinates issues seemed to be too numerous to cover in any way like that, so we just approved people fixing coordinates wherever/however they wished, without any recording of sources. In general we trust that all editor changes to coordinates are improvements; there have never been any cases where any editor was introducing bad information.

Now, in 2019, it seems that it might have been useful all along to record something about sources used, oh well. One issue is that coordinates may have been fixed in the NRHP county list-article, and that new article creators do not go out of their way to notice that, and end up just using the old NRIS2013a coordinates (which are off by 100 yards or whatever). Or the coordinates might be fixed by an editor only in the individual site article. A bot request could probably get a bot run to identify and list discrepancies, which could be a help, but we don't know which set are the improved coordinates, so no bot could make fixes.

After a couple discussions at wt:NRHP, a few editors have been using the available "source:" field in the {{coord}} template to record as sources either:

  • "source:NRIS2013a" to indicate that the source was the set of coordinates made available in the widely used Elkman's NRHP infobox generator system, which is largely based on a 2013/2014 NRIS download. The label might not perfectly describe the coordinates provided, because Elkman might have drawn coordinates from various sources. In practice it means whatever are the coordinates that the generator provides now (in 2019).
  • "source:NOTNRIS2013a" to indicate that the coordinates for a site are NOT the NRIS2013a coordinates, so evidently someone has changed them, presumably based on their informed knowledge.
  • "source:USERNAME" where USERNAME is the correcting editor's username.

It is intended to get a bot created and run periodically to report on counts of each type and perhaps to list them out, and to make fixes wherever there is better information in either the county list-article or the individual article, i.e. to replace the "NRIS2013a" ones by editor-improved ones.

In the latest update by Elkman to the NRHP infobox generator system (Summer or Fall 2018?), the coord templates were modified to include fields for "region:US_type:landmark" uniformly and for the specific name of the NRHP site, e.g. "name=Brandenburg House" for the coordinates in the suggested NRHP infobox for Brandenburg House. The only other field used, besides the actual degrees, minutes, seconds or digital coordinates numbers, is the routine "display=inline,title" field. This works okay and displays no error. For example, for Brandenburg House, the following is suggested:
{{coord|45|40|51|N|111|02|20|W|region:US_type:landmark|name=Brandenburg House|display=inline,title}}

To track coordinates' sources, even if not confirming or fixing them, it is currently necessary to manually add at least "source:NRIS2013a" into the coord template. Consider it recommended that this field be placed immediately after the coordinates themselves, so any future editor will be more likely to notice and update the source info, if they are making a change to the coordinates. However it turns out that simply adding this makes the template too long, so big error messages in red lettering are displayed in the article, as in this first version of the Brandenburg House article, wherein the coding is
{{coord|45|40|51|N|111|02|20|W|source:NRIS2013a|region:US_type:landmark|name=Brandenburg House|display=inline,title}}

Note it was determined by the new article creator that the county list-article coordinates are the same as the coordinates provided in the NRHP infobox generator. If the county list-article coordinates were different, then those should have been manually edited in and "source:NOTNRIS2013a" should have been entered. And if the article creator chose to look at Google maps or otherwise figure out better coordinates, then they should use "source:USERNAME" to indicate they improved them and to claim credit / accept blame for that.

The display problem can be fixed by dropping the "region:US_type:landmark" and "name=Brandenburg House" fields which seem not to be necessary or helpful (?? others' views welcome ??). Thus in this second version the coordinates display fine, with the coordinates coding being:
{{coord|45|40|51|N|111|02|20|W|source:NOTNRIS2013a|display=inline,title}}

In late August 2019 there is an offer at wt:NRHP for new and better coordinates and other information to be provided, and there is recognition the sources could be identified as one of “2017 dump”, “2019 spreadsheets”, or “weekly update of date x” (but the latter is not a source for coordinates info).

For brevity's sake, and to avoid the too-long coord template issue, it would be best if the specific coordinates sources could be coded briefly, say as "source:NRIS2013a" and "source:dump2017" and "source:spreads2019". What those abbreviations mean can be spelled out more completely here and/or in the main wp:NRHPHELP page and/or in the documentation page for the {{infobox NRHP}}.

It would be great if improved coordinates could be supplied in an update to the NRHP infobox generator, and for the source to be identified in each case. (Also, please drop the "region:US_type:landmark" and "name=Brandenburg House" fields). This would support further bot-supported efforts to find and fix unimproved coordinates anywhere. (First version of this page just now created --Doncram (talk) 03:04, 29 August 2019 (UTC))[reply]

Discussion?[edit]

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