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Revision as of 11:17, 27 September 2008

Geographical coordinates

WikiProject Geographical coordinates is of interest to WikiProject Geographical coordinates, which encourages the use of geographical coordinates in Misplaced Pages. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the project and see a list of open tasks.Geographical coordinatesWikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinatesTemplate:WikiProject Geographical coordinatesGeographical coordinates

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To do

ParserFunction Expr.php will soon correctly handle unicode minus

Hi!

MOS requires a unicode minus (U-2212) to represent a minus or subtraction operator for display. But if a template tries to evaluate that expression, parser functions #expr and #ifexpr break (bugzilla 15349). This new commit fixes that. It should be live in English wp in about a week, I don't know about others.

Didn't know if you guys were interested. Enjoy. Saintrain (talk) 00:19, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know.

While I can see the advantage from a typographic viewpoint, most software is still Unicode-unaware, and using Unicode minus signs will break all sorts of tools that only understand HYPHEN-MINUS when parsing numbers, including dump-parser code used for geodata maintenance. If we're not careful, we will end up propagating bad data through the system, regexes and number-parsing routines in most external tools will fail and negative numbers will be either ignored, or worse, turn into positive numbers.

Have the Kolossus team and Google's representatives been told about this? -- The Anome (talk) 08:40, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Update: see User:The Anome/Unicode coord test for a test case; currently the top two test cases are completely broken because the changes above have not yet been applied. It'll be interesting to see what happens as the software evolves.

However, the following test case does work, but currently breaks the Geohack page on the toolserver:

Here's a direct URL for the geohack page, using HYPHEN-MINUS in the usual way -- note that the minus sign turns 1° N into 1° S:

http://stable.toolserver.org/geohack/geohack.php?params=-1_N_1_E_

Here's the same thing using MINUS SIGN, which would happen if data was entered into a template using this convention -- the toolserver page ignores the minus sign:

http://stable.toolserver.org/geohack/geohack.php?params=-1_N_1_E_

I think a lot more testing is needed throughout the entire geodata ecosystem before we consider going live with this. I know all my current tools will break -- the fixes are trivial, but I will need to apply them to all of the tools, and then re-test them all. As the current single largest producer of Misplaced Pages geodata, I certainly won't be outputting templates with MINUS SIGNs embedded until I'm confident all significant downstream consumers can parse it correctly.

Perhaps the creation of "ASCII-number" and "Unicode-number" parser functions that perform the obvious textual transformations their names imply might help this transition? -- The Anome (talk) 10:00, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

I think the geohack, wikiminiatlas etc are brilliant and would be very disappointed were any of them to break. I think the distinction between minus and hyphen is silly "what colour would you paint the wheel" nattering. I am not advocating nor encouraging a switch to minus.

But if someone else does follow the MOS and use a minus, at least parts of the chain won't break anymore. I thought that knowing that #expr won't choke on a minus anymore would make things easier. One less thing to worry about. Sorry. Saintrain (talk) 15:33, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I agree, this feels very much like "painting the wheel": please don't take any of this as a criticism of you personally; I can see that you're just trying to stop things breaking, rather than pushing for incompatible changes. -- The Anome (talk) 07:26, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

WikiMiniAtlas should now be prepared for a possible introduction of MINUS SIGN. --Dschwen 15:46, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Related note: User:Werson, who often fixes MOS related issues in articles, requested the display of the minus sign instead of the hyphen at Template talk:Coord#Minus sign. We could still make the templates display negative numbers with the proper minus once MediaWiki can process the character, but limit coordinate entry to the character on most keyboards. That way only the screen scraping tools would need fixing. --Para (talk) 14:44, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Help please!

I've tried to put the following co-ords with the nice globe thingy at the top left hand side of Larmer Tree Gardens, but Captain Cockup is at home today. I've tried following the instructions in the MOS but to no avail. Could anyone help out please? Co-ords are 50 deg, 57 mins, 06.82 secs N; 2 deg, 04 mins 59.86 secs W. Thanks. Roisterdoister (talk) 14:22, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Oh, I meant to ask - can we link to Google Earth images? Is that allowed? Roisterdoister (talk) 14:24, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

I've added a coord for the place - best that you check it by clicking on the link at the top. The Mapserver provides a link to Google earth, so "no" is the short answer to your question, for the reason that a link is already provided ... we do not single out single map sources on the article page.

Any analysis of which part didn't work for you would be handy: we know that the documentation is not the best, and knowing where it went wrong for you would help us improve matters. Maybe. --Tagishsimon (talk) 14:53, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Thank-you, that was quick! I've checked and it's perfect. Didn't realise about the Mapserver thing linking to Goggle Earth, dur. My failed attempt is here: . I probably did something really stupid ... Roisterdoister (talk) 15:01, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

You used coor title dm and then supplied it with second parameters, which would probably have worked with coor title dms (note the last s). But we're playing coord games and deprecating coor * nowadays in any event. Glad it's all sorted out. --Tagishsimon (talk) 16:18, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Toolserver not responding

• The toolserver seems to be offline. Do you know a place to report this "bug" ? Is it on bugzilla ? Teofilo talk 05:17, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Tagging potentially geolocatable places without coordinates

The German-language Misplaced Pages has an interesting feature: article marked with {{Coordinate}}, but without actual coordinates, now generate a message saying "Koordinaten fehlen! Hilf mit." (English: "Coordinates missing. Help with this.") in the article header, at the same place that the coordinates would be if the coordinates were present. See http://de.wikipedia.org/search/?title=Puding&oldid=49699751 for an example.

If we were to implement similar functionality in {{coord}}, we could greatly advance progress towards completeness in geotagging articles. For example, an article about a town in Mexico could be tagged as {{coord|region:MX_type:city|display=title|country=Mexico}}. This could then both display the notice in the top right corner of the page, and put the article into a hidden category, something like Category:Places in Mexico without location data or Category:Mexico articles without location data.

To see how many articles could be tagged in this way, I've now generated a list of 56744 place articles that appear to be eligible for coding, but that I cannot yet automatically generate coordinates for, and have not yet been scanned by User:The Anomebot2. After checking a small sample of these using the bot, I have found that 39 of the 75 articles in the random sample are currently lacking geodata. Extrapolating this over the entire dataset would suggest that there are roughly 29000 articles that could be automatically tagged for geolocation by other means.

Does anyone think this would be a good idea? If so, I can easily start tagging these. -- The Anome (talk) 18:09, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

That's an interesting suggestion. {{No geolocation}} does something similar, but at the foot of the article. If {{coord}} is deployed without coordinates, then it is important that class="geo" is not present, otherwise a broken Geo microformat would be emitted. We'd also have to make sure that the additional code didn't significantly reduce the number of instances which can be used on one page. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 18:21, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, and yes.

See User:The Anome/articles missing coordinates by country for a breakdown by contry of the number of articles in the un-scanned list. -- The Anome (talk) 18:23, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

An idea: how about having a {{coord missing}} template to do this? It could take country name and location type parameters, allowing for fine-grained categorization. For example, Skomrak could be tagged with {{coord missing|country=Norway|type=Populated place}}. This would also not overload the {{coord}} template still further. -- The Anome (talk) 18:46, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

That seems eminently sensible; it would be easy to manually remove the string "missing" , and patently obvious that that should be done. It would also deprecate {{No geolocation}} and similar templates. And it would avoid distorting counts of successful {{Coord}} implementations. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 19:04, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

I've now removed every use of {{No geolocation}}, which was only used in six articles. We should now move to delete that template. -- The Anome (talk) 23:53, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Agreed (though, for the record, the low usage was because it is used short-term, and removed when editors add coordinates). See also {{LocateMe}}, {{LocateMeLong}}, {{LocateMeText}} and {{LocateMeBot}}. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:57, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

I've already replaced the occurrences of {{no geolocation}} with {{locate me}} notices on the respective articles' talk pages, so nothing should be lost. -- The Anome (talk) 00:02, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

I support The Anome's suggestion. Btw, there were uses of {{LocateMeText}} in three articles, which I replaced with coordinates. Spencer 21:33, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

{{LocateMeLong}} and {{LocateMeBot}} are used on talks of one article each. Spencer 21:40, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

{{LocateMeLong}} has slightly different function, in that it asks for a series of coordinates for a linear feature; like those on Tame Valley Canal. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:05, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

I've changed the single instance of {{LocateMeBot}} to {{LocateMeLong}}, which is more appropriate for the article concerned. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:08, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Great. In the interests of limiting template proliferation, do we have consensus to deprecate no-longer-used {{LocateMeBot}}, {{LocateMeText}} and {{no geolocation}} templates? This will leave {{locate me}} (on talk pages), {{LocateMeLong}} (at the bottom of articles) and the forthcoming {{coord missing}} (to be displayed in the same place as display=title coords) as the current set of missing-coordinate templates. -- The Anome (talk) 22:24, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

OK by me; in fact, I'd go further, and change all instances of {{locate me}} to {{coord missing}}, too. Can we use the new template, yet? If not, please let us know when it's ready. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:45, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Eventually, yes. But please don't use the new tag yet. I'd like to proceed slowly, to make sure that there's sufficient consensus for this before we start, and that every part of the system has been checked out in advance, so it doesn't go off half-cocked when deployed.

I suggest that we first get everything right, then perform a small experimental run of about 100 templates, then ask for comment from the community. If that's OK, we can then go ahead with adding these tags to large numbers of articles: as I say, I think we can add around 29,000 such tags at that point.

Things we currently need to resolve include:

• What should the tag message be?
• What should be the naming convention for the hidden templates added by the bot?
• What should the "landing page" for the "you can help" part of the tag look like?
• What parameters should the template take? I suggest just one, "country".

Please take a look at User:The Anome/coord missing test for an example of usage. -- The Anome (talk) 23:00, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

All agreed; it looks good, but lacks the yellow "highlighting" used on the WP-DE example you gave in your first post. My preference would be for something even more eye-catching. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:04, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

To answer your points in order, I suggest:

• "Coordinates needed; please add them."
• {{Coord missing/hidden}}? {{Coord missing/sub}}? some other in that format?
• Just use a link to Misplaced Pages:Manual of Style (dates and numbers)#Geographical coordinates
• Just "country" seems OK to me. Prose, or ISO codes?

I've taken the liberty of adding to the template documentation.

Postscript: Perhaps additional parameters could be allowed, but ignored, allowing simple addition of latitude & longitude values when converting to {{coord}} ? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:17, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

I've incorporated some of the changes above. See User:The Anome/coord missing test for what it looks like. Please feel free to change it some more. Remember that this tag is intended to appear in tens of thousands of articles, so it needs to look polished, like a natural part of the UI. -- The Anome (talk) 23:27, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Thank you; I have done, and am through for tonight. Good working with you! Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:43, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

I left some comments about the template at Template talk:Coord missing. Spencer 13:07, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

I'm confused. What do I use? =Nichalp «Talk»= 17:16, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Nothing just yet... it's not yet ready. Wait a couple more days, and we'll have it finalized, ready for a test run. -- The Anome (talk) 17:30, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Coordinates in US cities articles: where to display

Many US cities and villages have the articles coordinates specified in four places (e.g. Buchanan,_New_York):

• in {{infobox settlement}}. This includes "type:city"
• twice in the geography section (wikified in degree/minutes/seconds and in decimal degrees). This includes a broken "city" (instead of "type:city").
• once in the external links section through {{Mapit-US-cityscale}}, displayed there and in the article upper right corner. This includes "type:city_region:US"

While we probably all agree that that this should probably be limited to one or two place, the question is how.

Possibly solutions:

• 1. Use only the coordinates in the infobox, remove all others.
• 2. Convert mapit to coord with "display=title".
• 3. Remove mapit and add title display to the infobox or the coordinates in the geography section.

Changes to be made anyways:

• If the coordinates in the geography section are kept, "city" needs to be changed to "type:city". The two formats of the coordinates (dms and decimal degrees) some somewhat redundant to me.
• Ideally the infobox would add the population to type:city (see Template_talk:Infobox_Settlement#Coordinates:_type:city(#)_and_population_total).
• The infobox could include or generate a region parameter.

-- User:Docu (signature added per : Docu (talk · contribs))

I think you meant "...have the coordinates specified..." not "...have the articles specified..." and have adjusted your post accordingly. My preference is "1"; with the display set to title also, if preferred. BTW,. please use "#" for ordered (numbered) lists, instead of "*1", "*2", etc. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 13:21, 20 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for fix my comment. BTW it's a deliberate choice to use "*1" instead of "#": it avoids that the numbering fails if the formatting breaks. -- User:Docu

Infobox Protected area coordinates broken

I have recently fixed a couple if instances of {{Infobox Protected area}}, (example) where the display was horribly broken because no seconds had been entered in the coordinates. The only way to resolve the problem in the short term was to add zero seconds, but this is obviously not an optimal solution.

I reported the problem on its talk page over two weeks ago, but no-one has responded. Can someone with better template coding skills than I fix it, please? Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 07:19, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

This might be related: Template talk:Infobox nrhp#Coord transform broken. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 19:52, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Query

This talk page has 2 sets of overlapping coords in its title bar. Is this so Google earth will be able to pin it down (with 2 pins)? Occuli (talk) 14:33, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Google doesn't include talk pages in its mapping. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 15:06, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Broken geotags

I'd greatly appreciate some help fixing the geotags listed in User:The Anome/malformed geotag candidates: these should be the only current blockers to the next phase of geotag tidying by the bot. -- The Anome (talk) 22:20, 21 September 2008 (UTC)

Note: they're all done now. Thanks to everyone who participated in fixing these. -- The Anome (talk) 09:56, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Template: Coordinate TfD

I have nominated {{Coordinate}} for deletion. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 19:23, 22 September 2008 (UTC)

Bot news

User:The Anomebot2 has now finished the first run of converting roughly ~25,000 {{coor title *}} templates added by my bot. I'm now working through converting a second list of ~35,000 other similar, syntactically correct, tags identified by parsing the most recent dump file that were not addressed by the first run. This has also produced a list of ~2,000 tags which are syntactically invalid in various ways, which are now awaiting triage into groups for later processing. -- The Anome (talk) 11:32, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

...and in doing so, I've discovered a whole new class of errors, such as that in Queensbury, New_Brunswick, where longitude has both been labelled as "W" and also as a negative number, the resulting double negative thus putting it in the wrong side of the prime meridian; in this case, in the middle of Kazakhstan.

See User:The Anome/Geodata errors/Negative West for more. -- The Anome (talk) 11:38, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

All "Negative West" fixed. Do we have any "Negative South" errors? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 14:14, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! No, we don't have any "Negative South" errors; I checked. -- The Anome (talk) 17:26, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

Category:Coord template needing repair

I've cleaned out all the easy-to-fix articles in Category:Coord template needing repair. At this moment there are 35 pages left. New articles appear regularly (2 per hour?) thanks to Anomebot2. The pages remaining fall into one of three classes:

1. test or prototype pages in user space
2. dense lists of towns, villages, etc. (mostly in Scandinavia)
3. WP:GEO abuse and demonstrations

Should user space pages be cleaned up? Anyone care to create a smart script to clean up the list articles? —EncMstr (talk) 18:48, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks to Wwoods for helping out! There are only user space and WP:GEO talk pages left. Thirteen total! (If anyone else helped, thanks to you too!) —EncMstr (talk) 21:07, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

That would be me ;-) I've also used "nowiki" on some user/talk pages. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:27, 24 September 2008 (UTC)

I've just fixed another couple of dozen, so it's worth taking a peek at the category from time to time, at least while the bot's still slogging away, Also, please note that in some cases the coordinates are repeated, in plain text, in the article and need to be replaced with display="inline,title". Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 20:04, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

The bot is currently idle, after replacing ~60,000 {{coor title *}} tags, at a rate of about 1000 per hour. I'll take a look at the broken cases, and try to prevent these sorts of errors from recurring. Am I right in thinking that the most common error is the "seconds = 60" case, most probably caused by poor roundoff handling in the mapping software that initially produced the data inserted into the article? -- The Anome (talk) 08:47, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but there were other errors (I found one with minutes of "378" or some such!). Thanks again for your sterling work; do you fancy a crack at coor at *? If not, there are plenty of templates needing {{Start date}}s ;-) Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 12:43, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Also a couple with the wrong seperators: "coord|12_34_56|N|01_02_03|W|". Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 20:51, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

{{coor title *}} isn't anywhere near finished yet: tens of thousands remain that were not caught by the earlier dump-based scans; I'm scanning the live database for the rest, starting off with {{coor title d}}. Then it will be time to start auto-fixing the simpler syntactically broken cases, and finally on to hand-fixing the remaining cases. Once that's done, I can move on to doing the same thing all over again for "coor at *". I expect the whole process will take weeks. -- The Anome (talk) 13:26, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. There's some discussion at Template talk:Coor dms which may also be of interest. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 14:02, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Update: I've now finished a second bot pass on "coor title d": the remaining entries in Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Coor_title_d should all be either special cases the bot is currently programmed to ignore, or generated by templates. Can someone please find and fix the few templates involved, so that they use {{coord}}, so that the few remaining literal uses of "coor title d" are exposed? We will have to do this with each of the various "coor" versions, but this is at least a start on the process. -- The Anome (talk) 16:37, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

I've tried, but this one has me stumped. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 16:52, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

I've fixed it, at least judging by the few examples I've spot-checked. -- The Anome (talk) 17:14, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

So you have, thank you. Oddly, Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Coor_title_d still includes pages using templates I changed, from another computer, about an hour ago. Is there a lag with such "special" a pages and/ or template inclusions? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 18:16, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Yes. Such changes are put on the "job queue" for later execution. The changes will ripple through eventually. -- The Anome (talk) 20:42, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Right, In that case, I think I've now cleared everything, other than a few user- and talk pages, We won't know, though, until the template changes are taken into account. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 21:26, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

I've found some you missed (or ignored?), which had extra spaces (shown here as hashes) "coor title #d|" or "coor title d#|"; and another with underscores: "coor_title_d". Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 19:45, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Documentation of deprecated templates

A few hours ago, I removed documentation of deprecated templates. More recently, Docu (talk · contribs) added a table documenting those templates, plus another, Coordinate, which is not used on WP-EN and is recently nominated for deletion, with consensus appearing to support that - in fact, only Docu has spoken against it. Since one of the reasons for deprecating the nine redundant templates was to simplify things for editors, I removed the table, which I feel (especially in the light of his other edits on the subject, is bordering WP:POINT. He almost immediately re-added it, with the edit summary "please use talk to explain, if you feel there is problem", despite not having done so himself. Given that the templates referred to are deprecated, are currently being replaced, and are likely candidates for blanking, deletion or redirect, how does this table help editors; or help to improve Misplaced Pages? Is there consensus to remove it again? (I also note that, as it stands, the template is incomplete and misleading, despite complaints about partial inclusions when he placed an earlier version on this talk page.) Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 11:03, 27 September 2008 (UTC)

The table added at WP:GEO#Comparison_of_Coordinates_entry_methods documents various methods of to enter coordinates in Misplaced Pages, past and present. As such, it's important to this project.

BTW Pigsonthewing's qualification of "deprecated templates" is misleading, as not all methods use templates, nor are all of them "deprecated". -- User:Docu

• WikiProject Geographical coordinates pages
• Misplaced Pages pages with to-do lists