Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Archive 4

Latest status
The Map sources now has an entry Find nearby locations on GeoURL, which will present a list of Internet pages with geographic information (based on HTML meta tags). (The new Geo extension will ensure that the Wikipedia articles containing coordinates will get a geo.position meta tag that should make it possible for Wikipedia articles to appear on this list also.)

The type and region attributes are now implemented. The type will set an appropriate default scale (plus of course the advantages for future use. The region is a mechanism that enables selection of targetted map resources (e.g. region:US). -- Egil 18:12, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I have now implemented the database mechanism that keeps track of the articles with geographic references in realtime, and that has the ability to come up with a list of neighboring articles, with distance and direction stated. It is also possible for anyone to obtain a list of coordinates and articles for other uses, and there will be hooks for Wikimaps. I will do some more in-house debugging, and tune a couple of implementation details. After that, I will try to create a critical mass of articles with geographic locations on the test server, so that this scheme can be tested in a more realistic manner. -- Egil 07:36, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Area vs point
Many objects are not represented very well by points. Jan_Mayen may - because it is a lonely island - be identified by, but might be better defined by a Dublin Core Box from 7.9253 - 9.1711 W and 70.7914 - 71.1802 N. (But I have to admit that the bounding box of Norway - including Svalbard, Jan_Mayen and Bouvet_Island - would be rather useless.)


 * Agreed, but one has to start somewhere, right? This has to be an extension for further study. Would a square box do, or is a generic polygon required? (A square box certainly makes things very much easier wrt representation in the database). Anyway, going to polygons is soon bordering into general maps, for which there is a project already. -- Egil 17:11, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * With regards to the Dublin core box, it that a format that is suitable as inclusion as ordinary HTTP meta data? -- Egil 17:50, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Why doesn't it display?
' and " display on my browser. Whatever you are using does not. All I get is square boxes for minute and second. I don't see how making the coordinates unreadable on a least a subset of popular browsers is supposed to be an improvement. It certainly faills the user-friendly test if I am going to need to download new fonts just to read locations. Rmhermen 01:39, Mar 19, 2005 (UTC)
 * The characters being used in the template seem to be unicode 8242 and 8243 - prime and double prime, which are probably the "right" symbols to use. What operating system and browser do you use? I haven't had a problem on Windows XP with Firefox or IE, or Linux with Firefox. --ScottDavis 03:49, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * I agree with Rmhermen, ' and " are fine, there is no need to use &amp;prime; &amp;Prime; giving &prime; &Prime;--Patrick 16:36, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * But typewriter quotes are simply a poor substitute for primes. Let's figure out why Rmhermen's browser isn't displaying them before settling for a compromise.  &mdash;Michael Z. 2005-03-19 23:04 Z 

Is it time yet?
Hi. I signed up when I found this project because it looks like good ideas. I propose to try to find and add coordinates for towns and other items in Australia, particularly South Australia. It looks like I should lay them out as -34.25°N, 138.5°W or. Is this a good thing to do yet? Is there anything else I should put in these template calls (eg scale, type)? What should the last parameter be for suburbs of a city? What about for landmarks within the city centre? --ScottDavis 04:19, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * It would be very nice if you could include the type attribute. It should give you a reasonable default scale, so you don't have to worry about that. But the real benefit should be when the Wikimaps gets to happen. Landmarks anywhere should just have exact coordinates and type:landmark, we'll leave it to the map engine to manage. Cities should really have the population specified. Suburbs is a very good question, I believe we don't have a type for that. I'll try to look at what others are doing (GIS etc). -- Egil 11:43, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I've done a few towns in South Australia with region:AU-SA and no type. I've done at least one landmark (Victoria Square, Adelaide) with the region and type:landmark. Is type:city appropriate even for country towns? "City" has a legal meaning in Australia, and most towns don't qualify. Some gazetteers use "populated place" as a non-judgemental term. I'd prefer type:town or type:pp, and add the population if/when known. I'll try to add type:city (or type:town or an alternative if you accept it) to them tomorrow. According to suburb, what I mean by suburb is what Americans would call a neighbourhood. --ScottDavis 13:16, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC).


 * The term city was used simply because it was used in some US GIS resource. It is certainly meant to mean anything that should be marked on a map, from village to metropolis. By adding the population in parenthesis, the future map engine should be able to handle it according to size. If you think it is important, we can always have city and town as synonym attributes. -- Egil 10:11, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

The source I've been using (Geoscience Australia) uses the feature code LOCB - Locality (bounded), Town, Village, Populated place, Local government town, Town site (no population) for towns like Tanunda, and URBN - Urban area, City for Adelaide. Suburbs of Adelaide such as Elizabeth have feature code SUB - Suburb. Either the definition of type:city should be modified to say "City or town...", or a new type:town could be introduced. I don't mind which. --ScottDavis 23:19, 22 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Wow
In case anyone hasn't mentioned it: fantastic work! The work of the project adds a whole new dimensions of capabilities to Wikipedia. The implementation is excellent and easy to use. Well done. &mdash;Michael Z. 2005-03-19 15:15 Z 

Mumbai
I tried to get Mumbai into the d cordinate but I get an out of range error. Mumbai has a co-ordinate of 18.96N, 72.82E. See template:Mumbai infobox. I gave up after trying different permutations. How does the syntax work? Nichalp 19:12, Mar 20, 2005 (UTC)


 * I fixed it, check out Manual of Style (dates and numbers) for the decimal notation. -- User:Docu


 * Thanks for the link. I'll use the Mos for all my articles now. Nichalp 19:19, Mar 21, 2005 (UTC)

Very good idea!
My deep respect to the man, who generated it! Maybe somewhen in the future something similar applied to the sky (for objects with relatively constant location, like stars, there) will appear here, although I doubt, if at the present we can find for this such a good "locator" as e.g. MapQuest. Cmapm 23:27, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Gis extension
The &lt;geo&gt; tag, the map source mechanism, the database, the neighborhood article mechanism as well as a source mechanism for Wikimap and others are now all available as part of the Gis extension. If you would want to have this feature available for Wikipedia, you need to press your Wikipedia admin to have this extension enabled. -- Egil 10:30, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * Is there a way yet to include "  type:city " in templates? -- User:Docu


 * who is our wikipedian admin ? can we press them ? I'd love to see Geo meta data --neilp 23:40, 2005 Apr 19 (UTC)

More missing types
As noted above, there isn't really a type defined for towns/villages/suburbs, although city is intended to be able to do the job.

There are also no available types for non-administrative parts of countries or landforms other than isle. Missing types I can think of include --ScottDavis 14:03, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)
 * river
 * peninsula/cape/headland
 * inlet/bay/harbour/bight/gulf/fjord
 * region/area
 * port
 * lake
 * archipelago


 * This is a geographical classification. Using legalistic distinctions between whatever might be officially designated by some particular name such as a "town" or a "plantation" or a "village" or a "city" in any particular jurisdiction (the discussion above to which you refer here dealt with Australian legalese, IIRC) would be just plain idiotic.  Rough distinctions based on how much area they cover would make sense here, and population might be used for a rough estimate of that distinction.  But having  having some "cities" with 8 people and some "towns" with 800,000 people would be of no help whatsoever in choosing an appropriate scale at which to map these features.


 * Your grouping of what you see as missing is a good idea; would we need one name for each grouping? But as far as the purpose of including it at all in this template goes, I though that the only reason for it was to help start with an appropriate map scale.


 * So what's really "missing"? If these aren't something that you are normally going to "see" in any case, they aren't really anything "missing".  So unless you have some other use for these in mind, I don't see the relevance. I haven't followed all this discussion about this either, so maybe there already is something along those lines, but I haven't noticed it if there is.  Gene Nygaard 17:14, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Quoting from the project page, Sets the type of this location, which will be used for the reverse mapping of the points. Will also set the default map scale. The type is intended to be used for more than just setting scale. Ideally for many area features, the article should specify a box, not just a point.

I noticed the problem last night when I wanted to add template:coor with coordinates to Yorke Peninsula. Other problem examples for which there isn't yet an appropriate type include Murray River, Spencer Gulf, Great Australian Bight, Encounter Bay, Wrattonbully, Port Lincoln, Lake Alexandrina, Malay Archipelago. Most of these don't yet have coordinates entered. --ScottDavis 23:44, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I agree that there should be a very small list of very generally-applicable types. To do anything else will require constantly adding more and more specific types.

So I am confused as to why there are both "state" and "adm1st" types; I think that states are first-level administrative subdivisions in the USA and some other countries, and a state is also a country. &mdash;Michael Z. 2005-03-29 22:44 Z 

More thoughts about the type
The main use of the type is for the coming Wikimaps. This is under development. There needs to a type for towns/cities so they can be added and filtered appropriately. Other items that will be marked with a symbol on a map, like airports, mountains and landmarks are also required. For things that are generally shown as areas on a map, like major lakes, peninsulas, fjords, bays and islands, from the map drawing point of view, it suffices to give a central point and a name. On the map, only the name will appear, and it is assumed that the map itself will show the relevant feature. The coming geo tag has support for a bounding box, time will show how how useful this is.

The adm1st in the US was meant to be the county level. Perhaps that is confusing? In smaller countries, the county is the 1st level below country. In the US, the county is the 1st level below state. The adm2nd was meant to be at the municipality level. That would often be interchangeable with city.

town and village can be made a synonym for city if that is meaningful. In the maps, the distinction and filtering will be done by population anyway, so city/town/village will be exactly the same.

Perhaps it makes sense also to expand the "geographic area" category to include lake, isle, fjord, bay, peninsula and a few others. For the map drawing point of view they are treated the same, but when the neighborhood articles are listed, it is probably nice to see the difference? -- Egil 23:28, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)


 * So is this the way it works?:


 * state = province, région, oblast, canton (Switzerland)
 * adm1st = county (Ontario or USA), rural municipality (Manitoba), département, raion
 * adm2nd = arrondisement
 * ? = canton (France)
 * ? = communauté
 * ? = comune


 * That is not intuitive (I assumed state was used for U.S. states and adm1 for Canadian provinces. I know, if I had thought about it...).  Since there are three levels of administrative subdivisions, why not start numbering them from 1, and use generic names?:


 * sub1 = state, province, région, oblast, canton (Switzerland)
 * sub2 = county (Ontario or USA), rural municipality (Manitoba), département, raion
 * sub3 = arrondisement
 * sub4 = canton (France)
 * sub5 = communaté
 * sub6 = comune
 * sub7 = etc.


 * &mdash;Michael Z. 2005-03-30 02:54 Z 


 * I'm game to try using the bounding box for area features like many I mentioned above. Having a few distinct types might be helpful for understanding. It would better allow for future clever wikimaps to render the names differently (water features labeled in dark blue, land features in black, manmade features in red for example).


 * I also thought state was equivalent to adm1st. I don't recall what systems I've used that I might have picked that idea from, but it never occurred to me that adm1st was a division of a state.


 * I like the idea of city, town, and village being equivalent, but with different default populations if not specified. For example default city has pop 50,000, default town 5000, default village 500. I don't know if I've picked good scale numbers (one order of magnitude). Maybe 100, 10,000, 1,000,000 at two orders of magnitude.


 * --ScottDavis 14:12, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)