Talk:Mississippi–Alabama barrier islands

Coordinate precision
Respectfully, blanket use of D°M′S″ is definitely not best practice, as explained at WP:OPCOORD. At the latitude of these islands, one arcsecond east or west is only about 27 meters, while the island chain is 113 km long. This means, that, according to the guidelines in MoS, a suitable level of precision for the longitude (one that "give[s] precisions approximately one-tenth the size of the object") would be the nearest tenth degree, which is why I used that precision. Since the chain is much narrower north-and-south, I've added another decimal place to the latitude figure to accommodate your concern, which puts the pin right around the centroid of the chain. It still isn't hitting an island, and that's just fine; since we're giving the location of a discontinuous object, there's no reason to suppose the the best coordinates for describing the position of the island chain as a whole would happen to fall within any particular one of the islands. -Bryan Rutherford (talk) 20:17, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
 * The first rule of using coordinates is to point to the object. If you look at what I did there, you'll see that I made the coords 30.225, -88.6, which is still within the WP:OPCOORD guidelines, expressed as DMS. Abductive  (reasoning) 20:30, 21 March 2021 (UTC)
 * So, in fact, you've now put the coordinates to the nearest thousandth of a degree for both latitude and longitude, which, as OPCOORD points out, is less than 100 meters east-to-west at this latitude, which is far, far less than one tenth of the 113-km length of the island chain! Where is the confusion here? The precision that is closest to one tenth of the east-west extent of the object is one tenth degree, and to say that your change is in keeping with the guidelines in flatly untrue. And I'll point out again, there's no need for you to try so very, very hard to make the coordinates point at part of Horn Island, since this article is not about Horn Island; it's about the island chain, and all of the coordinate values that have been here so far have successfully pointed to the chain. -Bryan Rutherford (talk) 00:38, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
 * These are islands and the coordinates should point to land, not water, under the WP:Principle of least astonishment. This overrides any blind following of the OPCOORD not-really-an-official-guideline, which has also never had a strong consensus. As for Horn Island, I took the average of the furthest east point on Dauphin Island and the furthest west point of Cat Island, and it just so happens to be -88.61. Suppose there was a crescent-shaped lake—would it be appropriate to point to the land that is the geographical "center" of the lake? No, we would try to point to water as far from all shores as possible. Abductive  (reasoning) 05:50, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
 * As the article points out, the island chain that is this article's topic is a continuous sand bar that runs the full length of the sound, with some portions above water and some below, and the portions that are above water move and change shape over time; any and all of these coordinates point at the object that the article is written about. If you insist on thinking of the object as only the above-water portions, then you'll really impress me if you can find a way to put in one set of coordinates that somehow points to all five islands simultaneously! The subaerial portion of the sand bar is a discontinuous object, and it's silly to insist on pointing to only one piece of it; a casual search through the encyclopedia shows the same principle used in, for example, the coordinates in Chain O'Lakes, which (as a discontinuous lake system) is a more apt analogy than your hypothetical crescent lake. But, anyway, that has nothing to do with my main point here, which (as the section heading indicates) is that the longitude precision you're wanting to employ is unnecessarily and misleadingly high. You can still force the coordinates to point at Horn Island and also allow the longitude to be a suitably rounded 88.6°W. -Bryan Rutherford (talk) 12:56, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
 * I have gone back to 88.600 as you suggest. Abductive  (reasoning) 14:18, 22 March 2021 (UTC)

Mississippi-Alabama Barrier Islands
This document lacks recognition of the presence of Fort Massachusetts on Ship Island, or linkage with the Wikipedia document about its construction, occupation and later purposes in mid- to late-1800s. 152.36.133.97 (talk) 22:41, 13 July 2024 (UTC)