Template talk:Infobox settlement/Archive 14

Coordinates
Haultain, Saskatoon is showing up in Holland. Its coordinates (in the infobox) appear to be roughly OK yet are being translated into nonsense. (|latd= 52|latm=6 translates to 52N, 6E for some reason.) Is this a glitch in the infobox? Occuli (talk) 19:13, 29 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Fixed. It needed the lat_NS long_EW specified (N,W). By the way there was and probably still is a slew of bogus coordinates, where editors combined negative longitudes with the W postfix, resulting in coordinates on the eastern hemisphere. I could compile a list of these articles. --Dschwen 19:41, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

GDP and climate
I was editing the article about Araranguá based in the Portuguese article, but there is not any field for GDP or climate, like the Portuguese template does. May be the climate can be inserted using the Template:Infobox Weather (although I want a more simple field with climate type and average temperature), but the GDP information field (GDP and GDP per capita) would be very useful. Another fields to be added could be also nearby or neighbor cities and ethnic groups (but I concern that the last one can lead to some heated discussions). Gabrieldiego (talk) 01:49, 30 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I made some changes to Araranguá using the "blank" fields. For the near by locations, you can use Geographic Location.  &mdash;  MJC detroit  (yak) 03:46, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Geographic coordinates for a settlement
I'm looking at the geo-coordinates for a number of cities near where I live and they seem bizarre as in every case they are either pointing at empty land or residential neighborhoods two or more miles from the city downtown.. How are geo-coordinates determined for Wikipedia articles? One thought for a standard is to use the same center that's used for road distance signs to that city. Here is the U.S. federal standard:
 * http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/pdfs/2003r1r2/pdf_index.htm
 * Manual Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) for Streets and Highways
 * 2003 edition, Including Revision 1 dated November 2004 and Revision 2 dated December 2007
 * Chapter 2D - Guide Signs - Conventional Roads
 * Section 2D.36 Distance Signs (D2 Series)
 * The distance shown should be selected on a case-by-case basis by the jurisdiction that owns the road or by statewide policy. A well-defined central area or central business district should be used where one exists. In other cases, the layout of the community should be considered in relation to the highway being signed and the decision based on where it appears that most drivers would feel that they are in the center of the community in question.

Obviously, using that may make it tough to locate verifiable sources for the center of each settlement as it's done on a case-by-case basis. Some of the "answer" style web sites use something along the lines of "... a point near the center of the community. A public building such as a post office, city hall or courthouse is used as a point of reference for the center of the community." Unfortunately, none of these point to reliable and verifiable sources. askville.amazon.com even claims to quote an apparently mythical "federal regulation" and a couple of answer pages claim that wording is from the the state of Iowa DOT but again I can't verify it. --Marc Kupper|talk 20:31, 10 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Please see WikiProject Geographical coordinates and pages linked from there. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:25, 10 December 2008 (UTC)

Replace ² with 2
Replace ² with 2
 * WP:MOS, 7th bullet. Two instances. Cheers, Jack Merridew 09:12, 28 December 2008 (UTC)
 * ✅ (and the subtemplates) &mdash;  MJC detroit  (yak) 14:58, 28 December 2008 (UTC)

Add a line for disestablishment or "merging"
Now in 2009 here in Finland, over 99 municipalities merged with each other and thus many were disestablished (can someone pick up better English words for these?). So it would be a good thing if we could add this to this template and could see from it it's no longer a current municipality clearly. Either something along "Disestablished = 2008" or "Merged: Ekenäs, Pohja" (name of other municipalities it was merged). So please do so, thanks. --Pudeo? 12:23, 1 January 2009 (UTC)

Also, could someone look whether the line map could be put on shield's right side? It does work well now with countries that are close to equal sizes from sides, but look at Helsinki, Finland is too long and too thin country to fit in the template. If the map is on the right side like fi:Helsinki, it will work. There could be an option for this. --Pudeo? 12:31, 1 January 2009 (UTC)


 * In regards to your first request: a couple months ago we discussed adding something like this to the politics section:
 * extinct_title = ...
 * extinct_date = ...
 * The fields would allow you to specify the date that the municipality ceased to be, and to supply the appropriate term to use. (Original thread.)  These haven't yet been added — would someone be willing/able to make this change?  Huwmanbeing  &#9728;  &#9733;  13:39, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Sounds good. It should probably come after "Charter". Now we just need an admin.. --Pudeo? 15:36, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
 * ✅. I also added to the fields to the Infobox Finnish Municipality shell of Infobox Settlement.  It worked in a quick test in Helsinki (here the diff before I reverted). &mdash;  MJC detroit  (yak) 02:10, 2 January 2009 (UTC)


 * About the English words, according to Finnish–English Dictionary of Real Estate, published by the Helsinki University of Technology, "consolidation of municipalities" is the right English phrase for Finnish "kuntaliitos". --Apalsola t • c 18:37, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
 * You can title it whatever you want in |extinct_title = &mdash;  MJC detroit  (yak) 05:46, 3 January 2009 (UTC)

Twin Cities
Please add 2 or more "Twin Cities" lines to the template. I'm trying to edit Alexandria, which has 9 different twin cities, and only 7 of them appear because of the way the template is set. Thank you. --Lanternix (talk) 14:48, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I suggest adding three, for future-proofing. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 13:27, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

✅ but only 2 more fields. If we need one more someone can add it later. &mdash;  MJC detroit  (yak) 02:16, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Settlements in the Achaea prefecture
A number of articles in List of settlements in the Achaea prefecture have hard-coded tables instead of Infobox Settlement templates, I fixed one, but there are plenty more, if someone's looking for something to do! Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:17, 2 December 2008 (UTC)


 * I'll also make a bot request. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 13:18, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Demographic data
In the deletion debate for Community area, has a section on demographic data which is not part of this template. Would there be any objections to adding it here (suitably modified for global use, of course)? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 03:09, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
 * I'll see what I can come up with in the next few days. No promises.  &mdash;  MJC detroit  (yak) 17:25, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 15:11, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Check out the second example on the Template:Infobox Settlement/testcases page. That should be good enough, eh?  And here is the code that would be added if you would like to view it.  &mdash;  MJC detroit  (yak) 17:23, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
 * That looks good to me, thank you. The deletion debate closed as "no consensus", so I'll mention this on Community area's talk page, then re-list later. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 18:24, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
 * There have been no comments, so please go ahead with that change. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 13:24, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

✅. This was done a few days ago. Check out the "Complete Empty Syntax" on the main page (or the doc page) for the fields and the big explaination table for how they work. If you use them on an article, leave a note here so we can put it in the table as an example. &mdash;  MJC detroit  (yak) 02:16, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Area code
It would be useful to implement an  datafield to enable Area code to link to e.g. Telephone numbers in Croatia instead of just plain Telephone numbering plan. I have put up a possible solution at User:Admiral Norton/sandbox. --Admiral Norton (talk) 19:47, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
 * ✅. I did it in a slightly different way than your solution, but it works the same.  &mdash;  MJC detroit  (yak) 14:56, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Admiral Norton (talk) 00:20, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Move to normalize capitalization



 * Discussion of this meta-issue has moved to Wikipedia talk:Template namespace No further edits should be made to this section.

This should be moved to Infobox settlement, so we can just type its name by the normal rules of capitalization (settlement is not a proper noun). Any objections, before I make a request? —Michael Z. 2009-01-08 19:24 z 
 * I don't much mind, but I don't know that there's any particular need. There seem to be quite a mixture of infoboxes, some using Infobox xxx, some with Infobox Xxx (like Infobox Person) - I don't know which is more popular overall. I suppose the capital is justified by treating the word as the start of another (sub)name, as if it were Template:Infobox:Settlement (which logically it is). --Kotniski (talk) 20:47, 8 January 2009 (UTC)


 * The capitalization rules for articles and headings are clear and established (e.g., Infobox settlement), and they are also used in the Wikipedia and other namespaces. The colon denotes the namespace, and there are no subnames or sub-namespaces.


 * But another half-dozen forms are used for templates (Infobox Settlement, Infobox-settlement, InfoboxSettlement, etc). There's no reason to use any of them to make an editor guess which way to type something in the Template namespace. The problem is trivial, but so is the solution, so let's just move it. —Michael Z. 2009-01-08 20:58 z 
 * In normal English it would be "Settlement infobox". I don't see that we can deduce from any general rules whether the ungrammatical concatenation "Infobox ***" should have its second element capitalized or not - it's just an ad hoc name we've made up. (Editors aren't really inconvenienced one way or the other, anyway, as long as redirects are in place - I don't know whether making tens of thousands of existing articles use a redirect instead of the straight template name would have any effect on server performance.)--Kotniski (talk) 21:08, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
 * In fact the closest analogy to this grammatical structure that springs to mind is the military "Operation Xxx", where I believe the second element is normally capitalized even if a common noun. Anyway, I'm going to finally stop talking about this and get down to the work I've been avoiding for the last half hour...--Kotniski (talk) 21:19, 8 January 2009 (UTC)


 * With respect, the grammar is irrelevant (although I accept Thames River or the River Thames, so I don't see any problem with this particular title). We should use capitalization rules which happen to be normal English and also standard throughout most of the project.  I don't believe redirects are a problem, but that is also irrelevant.  And I just don't understand why you are arguing for a non-standard usage—you haven't actually provided a single argument which favours this capitalization.
 * The "Operation X" one doesn't count as an argument? Have you provided a single argument which favours non-capitalization?--Kotniski (talk) 07:10, 9 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I was just trying to enter Infobox province or territory of Canada along with this one. The redirects are not in place for thousands of templates.  I know this because I try to type template names ten times a day, and when they don't work I then have go searching for the random set of capitalization, hyphens, and inside-retarded-caps or whatever.  I'm fed up with having to do this again and again for the same templates, for no reason at all. —Michael Z. 2009-01-08 22:40 z 


 * But are we sure the non-capitalized version is the more standard one? Examples such as Infobox Person indicate it might not be.--Kotniski (talk) 07:09, 9 January 2009 (UTC)


 * It's not the same reasoning or rule as those for naming articles or headings. "Infobox" is more of a standard pseudo-namespace. A glance at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:PrefixIndex&prefix=Infobox&namespace=10 seems to reveal that it is standard to capitalise the first word following "Infobox". Double Blue  (talk) 21:13, 9 January 2009 (UTC)


 * What is a “pseudo-name”, and which orthographic rules require the next word to be capitalized? Do History of Ukraine and Ref label have “standard pseudo-names” requiring us to capitalize the following words?  Why are you trying to guess at rules which don't exist?  Why do you prefer an unjustified non-standard capitalization?


 * Maybe lot of infoboxes have this form, but there is no special standard for templates, and there is no special reason to insist on a non-standard capitalization scheme for them, e.g., Xt, WWIIGermanAFVs, Cold War tanks, Country data Germany, Uw-ablock, Ref label, Sisterlinks, Cyrillic alphabet navbox, Semxlit, Refimprove, Wiktionarypar.  Most of them should be normalized to conventional English, which happens to correspond to the standard for article titles and other namespaces like Wikipedia:. —Michael Z. 2009-01-09 23:50 z 
 * You do understand what I'm getting at, I hope, about the difference between "Country data", "Cyrillic alphabet navbox" or "Ref label" on one hand, and "Infobox Settlement" on the other. In the former cases we have a normal English phrase (meaning data about a country, a navbox for the Cyrillic alphabet, or a label for a ref); in the second we just have an ad hoc name (it doesn't mean a settlement about infoboxes, as it would if it were an English phrase). And as the "Operation" example shows, it is perfectly consistent with conventional English for such names to be capitalized. So if that's what we do, there's no need to change it. --Kotniski (talk) 08:40, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I get what you're saying, but you are clearly applying the logic inconsistently. I don't see any difference between the phrasing of Infobox settlement and Ref Label (oh look, yet another red link: let's go through the search, edit, and preview cycle another time or two.  Whee!).  The name of a specific military operation is a proper name, and we don't need to look it up to know that it would be capitalized.  Settlement is not a proper noun, so it isn't. —Michael Z. 2009-01-10 16:52 z 

This isn't an issue specific to this one infobox; please take it to, say, Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (infoboxes) or Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 14:17, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Thanks, I will post at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style (infoboxes) shortly. —Michael Z. 2009-01-10 16:52 z 


 * I've posted at Wikipedia talk:Template namespace. —Michael Z. 2009-01-10 17:43 z 

I don't understand what the issue is here. Referencing this particular template as either Infobox Settlement or Infobox settlement both work, in all contexts so moving it from one of these names to the other would have no practical effect at all. In general, searching for template: will find the template regardless of capitalization although templates must be invoked either by their actual name or using a redirect with exactly matching capitalization. If the goal is to be able to invoke (or link to) templates by "guessing" what their name should be, it seems like getting the specific name correct (and parameters!) is a much harder problem than guessing the correct capitalization. It seems to me that standardizing the capitalization wouldn't actually solve anything. -- Rick Block (talk) 16:02, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * It would solve the problem that capitalization is not standardized. That templates' capitalization conforms to any number of illogical schemes wastes editors' time constantly and repeatedly.  Fighting to keep it that way promises to waste our time forever. —Michael Z. 2009-01-10 16:52 z 


 * My point is that I don't think lack of standardization for capitalization of template names is a problem. It's certainly not a problem for finding templates whose name you know - for example if I enter "template:Infobox province Or terriTory of canADA" in the search box, and hit "go" I end up at Template:Infobox Province or territory of Canada (and not because of a redirect).  You clearly have encountered some kind of problem, but I don't understand what it is.  How exactly does lack of standardization for capitalization waste time?  -- Rick Block (talk) 17:44, 10 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I'd like to just use templates, instead of having editing sessions constantly interrupted to find them, again and again. The only solution is standardization, and there's no point in standardizing on anything but the existing scheme from other namespaces and standard English. —Michael Z. 2009-01-10 18:21 z 


 * Capitalization does matter when you link to or transclude templates, so standardization would indeed help. Renaming this particular template in isolation wouldn't help, particularly since in this case we have the redirect set up. However if all infoboxes were to be brought into line with a standard (regardless of whether it was capitalized or non-capitalized), I'd be in favour.--Kotniski (talk) 17:50, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

[I've restored the discussion here and linked back. I don't like my comments moved somewhere else without their context. Throwing half a conversation into a new threads will discourage new participants. Thanks for understanding. —Michael Z. 2009-01-10 19:32 z ]


 * I've commented there and would encourage folks to continue the thread there rather than here. -- Rick Block (talk) 20:28, 10 January 2009 (UTC)

Questions
Could somebody more familiar with this template than I please answer the questions asked here? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 00:33, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
 * I gave it a once over. They were good questions that may lead to some improvements.  &mdash;  MJC detroit  (yak) 02:40, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 20:35, 12 January 2009 (UTC)