Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Archive 9

New tag type option
I've added a new option for the type tag on geotags, since lakes do not fit any of the existing tag types: type:lake, with the obvious meaning. -- The Anome 20:37, 26 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Hi, at the german wikipedia we use "waterbody", so we can also tag bays, fjords, lakes, glaciers ... Please use also "waterbody". -- Stefan Kühn 16:29, 17 September 2006 (UTC)
 * I'll do that: I've got 327 article to correct, which I will do when I have time. -- The Anome 02:21, 28 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Done. -- The Anome 17:02, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

Progress so far
A walk of the category tree suggests that perhaps 140,000 of the current 1.37 million articles on Wikipedia are about places of some sort. Of these, about 48000 are listed in Stefan Kühn's list of geotagged articles, and the Anomebot has so far marked an additional 16000 or so articles with geodata taken from either the GNS or Stefan's listing of coordinates in the de: Wikipedia, making a total of 64000 tagged articles: so just under half of all place articles are now tagged. The actual situation is probably better than this, because a large number of British place articles are currently tagged with OSGB36 coordinates, which Stefan's tool does not yet pick up. -- The Anome 14:25, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Template to request coords?
Is there a template people can put on the talk page of an article to request that coordinates be included in the article? Similar to reqphoto or reqdiagram. Qutezuce 03:26, 13 September 2006 (UTC)
 * The German wikipedia has the template under Vorlage:Lagewunsch. I wonder if it could be adapted for the English one. --Carboxen 05:40, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
 * I'm making Template:LocateMe right now. Andy Mabbett 15:36, 31 March 2007 (UTC)

Village pump discussion
Please participate at Village_pump_(technical). -- User:Docu

Update from kvaleberg.com to Template:Coor URL
To simplify updates, I added the new url to that template, rather than to each template using a kvaleberg direct link. A few links still need fixing, try: Special:Linksearch Kvaleberg.com (629 currently, update is a bit delayed). -- User:Docu


 * It's down to 109 now. Most if not all of them are incorrect uses of the coordinate links or links in test templates/Talk- or other (non article) namespaces.


 * At least the ones in article namespace should be fixed. A few Serbian infoboxes still need fixing. Some of them include the country's coordinates rather than the city's, or the link points to the coordinates for the country rather than the city, even when displaying other coordinates.


 * BTW: To fix some of the infoboxes, I made Template:Coor at dms and Template:Coor at dm. It displays the coordinates in the infobox and in the article text (e.g. at Westpac Stadium). -- User:Docu

Map script problems: bug report
There seems to be something wrong with the new map source page that is now being linked from geotags: for example, if you go to the URL

http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/geo/geohack.php?params=51_25_N_0_12_W_region:GB_type:adm1st

the page is convinced that the location is

51° 25′ 0″ N 0° 12′ 0″ E

rather than the correct

51° 25′ 0″ N 0° 12′ 0″ W

However, the URL http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/geo/geohack.php?params=51_25_N_1_12_W

produces the correct result.

This seems to be a general problem with the degree parsing or rounding code around zero degrees: for example, the URL

http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/geo/geohack.php?params=0_31_S_0_31_W

resolves to

0° 31′ 0″ N 0° 31′ 0″ E

-- The Anome 11:17, 3 October 2006 (UTC)


 * See also User_talk:Magnus_Manske/GeoTemplate. -- User:Docu

Wikimapia ?
Hi there,

A newbie question: when I follow a "coordinate" link and get to a page such as , I see there a number of links to various useful map servers. But there is none to Wikimapia (, with appropriate parameters). Is it possible to add such links? I think such a link would be quite useful, because t would allow a Wikipedia reader, when he reads an article about a city or another place, to get to a page that not only allows him to view a detailed annotated map, but also to participate in a "peer-reviewed" collaborative annotation process, very much in the spirit of Wikipedia itself. ( Vmenkov 17:59, 19 October 2006 (UTC) )
 * There is now a template for linkage to Wikimapia (Template:Wikimapia); however, its format and usage have not been reviewed by this WikiProject, which I think would be useful; this template was recently subject to decimation with the edit comment 'Wikimapia is not a Wikimedia project'(sic). Wikimapia now supports back-linkage to Wikipedia in the form of a simple dedicated input field in the site-editing dialog.  An ongoing discussion regarding x-linking Wikipedia and Wikimapia appears at User talk:Alexandre Koriakine, and it might be useful to re-direct this discussion to a sub-page of this WikiProject. --User:Ceyockey ( talk to me ) 12:56, 21 October 2006 (UTC)


 * Looks like a duplicate of the geolinks templates (see Category:Coordinates templates). Please replace them with one of those. -- User:Docu

Project directory
Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 14:46, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Announcement: Wikipedia-World
Please, take a look at de:Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Georeferenzierung/Wikipedia-World/en, it's a project of Stefan Kühn and me. Its in the beta-phase and not ready. We have collected 143.000 coordinates from different Wikipidias worldwide. I'm waiting for your comments and ideas. Perhaps we find on this way somebody who whats to intensive supporting us with programming. For integration of other languages we need a central list of Geotags like the interwikilinks in Category:Coordinates_templates in many languages. de:Benutzer:Kolossos

Google's Wikipedia Layer in Google Earth
Google have added a wikipedia layer to Google Earth. Official Google Blog: Opening my eyes to a whole new world -- Grand Edgemaster Talk  13:18, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Machine readability of Wikipedia's geocoding
As mentioned above, Google earth is now offering Wikipedia data. It's a fantastic thing, but it's nowhere near as fantastic as it could be or should be right now because of an important problem: Wikipedias geocoding is only minimally machine readable.

The human readers of Wikipedia consider an article geocoded whenever there is something in the text that looks like coordinates. But, for many reasons, it would be both difficult and unwise for a machine to read our geocoding by taking the HTML rendered text and scanning it for numbers that look like coordinates.

Fortunately, we have standards for geocoding in Wikipedia. ... but we don't really, not from a machine readability perspective. There are many dozens of templates including infoboxes and subject area specialty templates which can be placed in an article to add coordinates which ultimately have the same visual effect as the basic coor title d template. It is unreasonable to expect third parties to continually update their software to support this ever widening collection of templates.

As a result Google earth isn't managing to grab all the articles which we have geocoded. In order to fix this and to make our data maximally useful for others, we must establish a standard machine readable interface for geocoding. The standard must be simple, support extraction via nothing more powerful than regular expressions (hopefully POSIX re rather than PCRE), not require template traversal (since doing that right will pretty much require that they implement full mediawiki wikitext parsing as well as have a complete and current copy of all templates).

I propose the following:
 * 1)  and  be declared the standard for basic coordinate insertion.
 * ...and perhaps we should remove and instead add a optional titleonly argument to the other, like  . Thoughts?
 * 1) For all other coordinates inserted via templates (such as infoboxes), we should set the coordinates via a set of standard argument names which are reserved for that use. I propose we use lat_degrees, lat_minutes, lat_seconds, lat_direction, long_degrees, long_minutes, long_seconds, long_direction.  All infoboxes and other templates which take coordinates would be required to use these arguments. Any use of these argument names in a template would be taken to be a specification of the coords for the page the template is used on. Any template which uses these argument names for any non-geocoding purpose would be taken out and shot.
 * There are many other sets of these in use today. Perhaps the most notable alternative is latd, latm, lats, latns,longd. I do not believe these are sufficiently unique argument names.
 * 1) Funny business like building up the location using tranclusion, such as would be declared unsupported.
 * It would be easy enough to run a bot to catch weird/broken uses of the standard templates.

I *think* these two cases would solve our current uses. Templates such as Geolinks-US-cityscale could be switched to the second mode of operation, by switching it to using named arguments. Google currently supports a superset of what I've proposed above, but I believe the proposed would fit our needs.

I really need comments on this, because I'm sure I've overlooked some stuff. Once we reach a consensus I'll begin coding a bot which will convert all the cases I can find into whatever standard we decide on. --Gmaxwell 20:43, 11 December 2006 (UTC)


 * May I ask for clarification to your corollary to point 1? Otherwise, I'm in full agreement, so long as we leave open the choice between d.ddddd and d m' s" for the editor.  —CComMack (t–c) 04:43, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Right. I'm saying we should support d, dm, and dms. I don't think thats too hard for an application author, and it avoids making the editor do conversion. --Gmaxwell 16:33, 12 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Just to be extra clear, since I've been asked twice about it: If you want decimal degrees you'd just use "corr title d|10.12323123" and lat_degrees=10.123321123.. If you want DMS you fill them out. I'd expect most software to 'do the right thing' but once we decide on what we'll support, I'll write a set of test for software authors to test against. --Gmaxwell 16:44, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Support as long as decimal degrees work. Otherwise I'd want to see decimal degrees supported somehow. But getting rid of the template proliferation seems generally a good idea. Here and elsewhere!!! There are thickets of them... I suspect people write new ones when they can't find the ones that do what they want, even if they're out there. ++Lar: t/c 16:46, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

As long as decimal coordinates will be accepted, I think it's lovely that you're proposing this, Greg. I'm working on another MediaWiki project, where semantic tagging and the ASK query will be used often, and boy is it easier to set up a query with decimal values than trying to "convert" minutes and seconds to decimals! --207.8.215.81 17:32, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Support. --Opie 01:12, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Been geotagging a number of spots lately, specifically islands in Thailand. Also, recently implemented Dschwen's WikiMiniMapia, which is outstanding. Came across one article that makes the case for this need : Phi Phi Islands, which has geotags for both the islands which the article is about, and the nearby administrative district within which the islands are located. Clearly need to identify one, out of many possible, geotags in an article that are THE coordinates of the topic being covered. I think coor title does that effectively. Convenient, defined tag for external pulls, while allowing additional geotag references within that article body. I support this.
 * Would like to inquire on the info boxes (your #2). Thailand's Amphoe (district) infobox has

 Infobox_Amphoe| coordinates=| ... 
 * One example of how that could be filled in would be:
 * coordinates=coor title dms|13|09|48|N|100|48|30|E|region:TH_type:admin2nd|
 * Or, alternately, this infobox would need to be filled out to the lat_degree, lat_minute, etc., as you suggest in #2.

Question is: would infoboxes have to use lat/long parameters, or would inclusion of "coordinates" field with coor tag be sufficient? - Thaimoss 14:52, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

"Wikipedias geocoding is only minimally machine readable ... It is unreasonable to expect third parties to continually update their software to support this ever widening collection of templates - so it is. Fortunately, the Geo microformat resolves this issue completely. Andy Mabbett 14:52, 31 March 2007 (UTC)