User:The Anome/Pros and cons of visible coord missing tags

Arguments for and against coord missing producing visible tags in articles.

Core policies

 * Article about places that do not contain a clear description of where they are are missing possibly the single most important piece of data about that place; adding that information is an essential part of Wikipedia's core encyclopedic goal
 * Coordinates provide a verifiable citation to dozens of independent third-party reliable sources (maps, satellite photography, GIS databases) that can be used to verify the existence of, and correct location of, the subject of the article; see WP:V, WP:RS
 * Coordinates Build the web by automatically allowing the discovery of nearby places

Benefits to editors

 * Coordinates make articles visible on resources such as Google Maps, and thus draw editors to articles, encouraging development of those articles; this is particularly relevant to geographic stubs
 * Coordinates allow the generation of new types of on-wiki resources, such as the miniatlas
 * Coordinates provide third-party reusers with useful information, can be used to integrate Wikipedia with GIS applications
 * Coordinates can help interwiki linking
 * Insistence on adding coordinates makes it harder to create hoax articles
 * Bad coordinates are self-cleaning over time; editors familiar with the subject can see at a glance that an article is in the wrong place when checking out the map link
 * The mere act of addition of coordinates draws editors to articles

Why coord missing?

 * Most articles aren't geotaggable, but hundreds of thousands are, many of which still need coordinates
 * Not all articles can be automatically geocoded from databases; those that can be, already are
 * coord missing helps identify and categorize the subset that haven't yet been coded by the bot, and therefore may need tagging by hand
 * Many editors are now adding these tags to articles when creating them, and removing them by adding coordinates
 * In addition, the geolocation bot can add these tags to articles that it can identify as taggable, but not code by itself
 * This is highly effective, with hundreds of articles now being tagged by hand each day, even without the tags being visible to all editors; this activity is already highly correlated with tagging activity, as can be seen from the output of Para's coord missing tool

Why visible tags?

 * Visible tags encourage the addition of coordinates to articles
 * With a backlog of tens of thousands of articles to be tagged, we need help from "drive-by" contributors; visible tags are intentionally a means to pull in general contributors with specific interest in the subject of the article.
 * It also draws the attention of personality types that are attracted to map resources and consider adding coordinates to be recreational
 * The visible tag makes the need visible to all readers, not just wikigeeks
 * The current process using invisible coord missing is currently removing ~250 tags a day; undoubtedly, visible tags will multiply that rate since all users will be able to see the need
 * Follows a convention established by orphan, wikify, merge and others
 * coord missing is discrete and occupies a space only ever used to display coordinates

Why not on the talk page instead?

 * Although it is generally established that WikiProject coordination tags should go on talk pages, instead of in the article body, this is not such an activity.
 * Coordinate tagging, like other forms of citation tagging, is not a WikiProject-specific activity; even now, the vast majority of taggers and tag-removers are not members of the geographical coordinates wikiproject
 * Adding inline tags to demand verification, such as fact and who is already standard practice, and is massively used all over Wikipedia; see Category:Citation and verifiability maintenance templates and Category:Inline templates for the wide range of such tags
 * If you put the tag on the talk page, you can't make it visible to drive-by editors, which defeats the entire point of visible tagging, see below
 * Putting coord missing in the article body allows category intersection with the main article category tree in ways that would not be possible if it was put in the talk page; this is invaluable for maintenance purposes, because the article category tree is much more fine-grained than that of WikiProjects, and relevant WikiProjects simply do not exist for many cases

Against

 * Visible tags make Wikipedia look unfinished
 * Visible tags clutter up articles
 * These should be WikiProject coordination tags, not in-article tags
 * Slippery-slope argument: if one Wikiproject can do it, why not every one? This will fill articles up with tags asking for extra information
 * No-one WP:OWNs articles
 * We don't want random people to geotag articles; they might add bad coordinates, let's leave it to the experts
 * The no free photo—do you own one? campaign for biographical articles (March–April 2008) was stopped for several reasons, generally summarized as being disruptive to the tagged articles; coord missing would be some fraction of that
 * Applying these tags to tens of thousands of articles is an exceptional change to Wikipedia, and should not be done without good reason

Counter-arguments to objections

 * Wikipedia is unfinished; the tags are there to help get it finished
 * Visible coord missing tags are small and discreetly positioned, unlike templates such as copyedit
 * They use space which is only used for coordinates, and do not take up any space within the article body itself
 * There is already well-established precedent for the use of inline verification tags and for the mass tagging of articles; many of the existing inline verification/cleanup tags are already used in tens or hundreds of thousands of articles, see for example orphan
 * coord missing tags are, in any case, self-eliminating, see above
 * If you don't want random people adding information to articles, you've come to the wrong encyclopedia project
 * Agreed, no-one WP:OWNs articles; issues should be decided on the balance of encyclopedic merit alone; see all of the above for discussion