Wikipedia:How to add geocodes to articles

This is a short guide to adding geographic coordinate tags to Wikipedia articles.

Why geocode articles?
By adding coordinates, a Wikipedia reader can easily view the location on a street map, nautical chart, topographic map, by satellite photo, realtime weather map, and many other options. Coordinate data makes an article eventually appear in various services such as Google Maps Wikipedia overlay, Google Earth, Copernix.io and Wikimedia's map service. Coordinate data also helps readers looking for geographically based data, such as locations near a reference point, or related information. For example, this link from Mount Hood simultaneously shows the location of the summit and of all its glaciers.

How to tag an article
For most geographically based articles lacking a coordinate, a coord missing tag was added to the article's source wikitext just below the External Links section. Replace it with suitably customized. Once the coordinate data is added, the article displays a mapping link at the top right, alongside the article title. Anyone can then access map resources using that link.


 * For a village, use the centre of the current village, where this is difficult choose the earliest known settlement of that name, or the central post office if all else fails.
 * For large military and industrial establishments (castles, barracks, dockyards, car plants) use the main gate, or if that cannot be found, the approximate centre of the establishment.  See here for further help
 * For administrative districts, use the location of the head office, or if that cannot be found, the approximate centre of the district.

Linear features
The possible methods of tagging linear features (rivers, roads, tunnels, etc.) are being discussed at WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Linear in order to formulate a policy. Please contribute!

How to determine geographical coordinates
You can find a list of ways to get geographical coordinates at Obtaining geographic coordinates.

Note that regardless of the source of coordinates, it is good practice to evaluate whether they appear reasonable at first glance. In particular, more than one place in a country may have the same name; in which case, you should very carefully check which place is meant—or if you are unsure—leave the article for someone with local knowledge to tag later.

Please don't be overly precise, but do ensure that the single point that the chosen pair of coordinates represents does fall on or within the feature.

How to find more articles to tag
You may already have had a list of articles missing coordinates posted in the message to your WikiProject. If so, please remove articles from that list when you're done with them. This will help other editors by eliminating duplication of effort.

Alternatively, up-to-date lists of articles on articles missing coordinates for most countries are in the subcategories of Category:Articles missing geocoordinate data by country.

More advanced users may want to use CatScan to intersect one of the sub-categories of Category:Articles missing geocoordinate data by country with other, subject-specific categories to provide up-to-date lists of eligible articles for particular subjects. For example, this CatScan finds articles missing coordinate data related to the U.S. state of Oregon. Use that as a starting place.

When an article should not be tagged
The lists of articles for tagging are generated automatically by a bot. Although we've tried our best to eliminate errors, occasional articles may have been listed by the bot that cannot or should not be geocoded. The tag is usually placed nearly at the bottom of the wikitext, below External links and above the category and stub tags.

When this is the case, simply remove the coord missing tag from the article, and this will remove the article from future requests.

Further information
To learn more about geographic coordinates on Wikipedia, please visit WikiProject Geographical coordinates - and feel free to sign up!