Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Archive 23

Citing verifable sources
I've been digging through a handful of the articles at Category:United States articles missing geocoordinate data (thanks for !), and although many of the locations have coordinates that are relatively easy to find or calculate, some of them have proven to be much more challenging. For those particularly tough ones, when I do find a verifiable source, I'd like to be able to reference it, but I don't know how to do that when I've got the coordinates displaying in the title. For example, in Tassajara Formation, I'd like to do something like but that doesn't connect the footnote to the coordinates. For now, I stuck the reference after the first sentence, but that sentence isn't really what the reference applies to. How should I be doing this? Travisl (talk) 18:17, 8 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I'll point out that the following emits the footnote link between the globe and the coordinate, although I hesitate to recommend the incantation. It works because coord does not have a ref parameter thus ignores it, but the wikiparser detects the ref tag.  -- SEWilco (talk) 17:50, 10 October 2008 (UTC)   


 * gives 37.86°N, -122°W which also gives an empty references section ( and the same for northing. The tool takes the usual decimal coordinates on Wikipedia and redirects to the NPE Maps site. So for example, the NPE link above shows Abbots Ripton railway station, which according to the article is at coordinates 52.39306°N, -0.20556°W. The URL http://toolserver.org/~para/wgs2npemaps.php?ll=52.393056,-0.205556 with those coordinates leads to the same NPE page. It seems to work elsewhere too, but please test before putting it on GeoTemplate. --Para (talk) 18:35, 20 November 2008 (UTC)


 * I've tested it on four locations and am satisfied that the target is always fairly central on the map. Observing that it alters the position of its map by whole squares, and has a display of 4 rows by 8 columns, I don't think we can do better than you have done, Para, in getting a more central display of the target than we're getting. It gets a big tick from me; thank you very much for implementing it. --Tagishsimon (talk) 20:38, 20 November 2008 (UTC)


 * If we follow the geo-links in 52.39306°N, -0.20556°W, and select 'Old OS Maps' on the right, we are then taken (in npe maps) to an undefined page (trying to use #7576,-5566,1). Any ideas? (Para's link in contrast works perfectly.) Occuli (talk) 22:17, 20 November 2008 (UTC)


 * That 'Old OS Maps' on the ponies.me.uk site was added to GeoTemplate five months ago and the link has been broken ever since. Something tells me old maps aren't that popular when nobody has mentioned anything before. The latitude and longitude were swapped in the link, I fixed it for now. However, we should replicate the links to those services on GeoTemplate, if we haven't already. Then the only remaining advantage of that site is the transparent Google Maps overlay. --Para (talk) 00:12, 21 November 2008 (UTC)

Vyf Rand
As part of the Nearly Done Countries challenge, I thought I'd take a look at Namibia's Vyf Rand article.

This specifies the location of Vyf Rand as "an informal settlement a few kilometres east of [Okahandja]", which cuts down the range of possible locations somewhat. This map gives a set of six possible locations for it.

This news report describes children having to walk 7 km each day to get to school at Nau Aib, implying that it is 3.5 km away from Nau Aib; there are coordinates for a Nau Aib clinic given here as -21.98823°N, 16.92488°W.

This photo is labeled as "Viewing Vyf Rand", but there's nothing at the geocoded point, suggesting that this was the point the photo was taken from, not Vyf Rand itself. The full-sized version of the photo (click on the photo itself on the Panoramio page) may well provide enough information for a sufficiently ingenious person to locate it by a combination of geometry and map-reading. (Possibly here, or here?) Can anyone help pin this down? -- The Anome (talk) 15:04, 12 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Good research, but I'm not able to pin it down any better. However, I have e-mailed two people who have been providing spiritual support to church leaders in Namibia  and who have been in Vyf Rand. If they can provide coordinates, I'll use them. It's certainly not from a verifiable source, and it's from a primary source, both reasons that I'm hoping we'll find something published and verifible, but for now, if I get them from the Garbers, I'll clearly note it as such on the page. Travisl (talk) 20:16, 12 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Response received, coordinates added, Namibia done. See Talk:Vyf Rand for more info. Travisl (talk) 03:12, 14 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Fantastic! Satellite maps indeed confirm that there's something that looks very much like a squatter camp at that location. I note that my two guesses as to its location were way out. -- The Anome (talk) 13:43, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Tool for Google Maps
Hi WP:GEO! I have recently created this rather rudimentary tool for calculating normal geographic coordinates out of Google Maps links. Center on a location in Google Maps, right-click, click 'link', copy/paste the link into the first line of the tool, and click 'Go'. The 'WikiMarkup' result currently only works for north/east locations, although if there's enough interest, I'll fix this and add a documentation. Apologies if a similar tool already exists (I couldn't find one). -- Ynhockey (Talk) 17:53, 13 November 2008 (UTC)


 * I use http://mapper.acme.com/, which gives you a cross-hair to put on the target, and a choice of units for coordinates. For the US, it also gives you the choice of USGS topo maps, in addition to Google's maps and satellite photos.
 * —WWoods (talk) 20:03, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I didn't know about this tool. It uses a highly outdated version of Google's maps though, therefore useless for Israel :( but I'm sure it's great for the US. -- Ynhockey (Talk) 20:14, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Huh! I'd never compared them like that before. I'd assumed Acme was running on top of Google somehow. —WWoods (talk) 22:57, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks to Ynhockey; it's an interesting tool which i may use ... it certainly requires less keystrokes through the tool than my current method of scraping the coords from multimap. And it gives me coord in DMS, which I like. I'd kinda like a type radiobutton on the screen so that I can choose a type; also a field for inputting the region, so that I can get all of the elements of the coord tag I conventionally use, such as . All that said, I'd actually prefer, if anyone has the ingenuity, to get a version of some jaavascript which gives me a coord in DMS, along the lines of the following, which if summoned as a bookmark when on a google map, gives a decimal coord: javascript:void(prompt('',%22°N, °W%22)); --Tagishsimon (talk) 20:52, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I have incorporated some of your suggestions, although I'm not quite sure how the whole type/region thing works on Wikipedia. Also, at this point I would not like to use any JavaScript, but if I have time, I'll play around with maybe incorporating the Google Maps gadget directly into the page. -- Ynhockey (Talk) 21:58, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks again. The one last change I suggest would be to constrain the seconds to 0 decimal places, or else to provide two output boxes, one with seconds to 2 dp, t'other to 0dp. Decimal seconds ... too precise in just about every case. thanks --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:06, 13 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Done. I made it still default to 2, but if you choose another number, it sticks until you exit the page. -- Ynhockey (Talk) 22:19, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Howdy - I tried the second javascript option (the long one) listed at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Obtaining_geographic_coordinates#Google_tools This seems to give incorrect coordinates. The first (short) one works, but I prefer the output format of the second option. Anybody out there know how to make it work right? If so, this would be a huge help! -- Kojones 19:19 US Mountain Time, 30 November 2008