Template talk:GeoTemplate

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Geographical coordinates GeoTemplate is of interest to WikiProject Geographical coordinates, which encourages the use of geographical coordinates in Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, visit the project page.
Subpages
  • /doc - Documentation on the keywords
  • /sandbox - Sandbox for test edits and design work
  • /lang - Language bar hack
  • /guideline - Guidelines for link inclusion
Test coordinates
Without region codes
New York City 40°43′N 74°00′W / 40.71, -74 (New York City)
Australia 35°18′S 149°08′E / -35.3, 149.133 (Australia)
Chile 33°26′S 70°40′W / -33.433, -70.667 (Chile)
Anadyr, Russia 64°44′N, 177°30′E
 With region codes
US: White House 38°53′52″N 77°02′12″W / 38.89767, -77.03655 (The White House)
GB-LND: London,Trafalgar Square 51°30′28″N 0°07′41″W / 51.50778, -0.12806 (London)
JP-13: Tokyo 35°41′N 139°46′E / 35.683, 139.767 (Tokyo)
RU: Moscow 55°45′8″N 37°37′56″E / 55.75222, 37.63222 (Moscow)
AU-ACT: Canberra 35° S 149° E
FI-LS: Akaa 61°10′N, 23°52′E
CH-VS: Zwischbergen 46°10′N, 8°7′E
NZ: Auckland 36°51′S, 174°47′E

After you change this template it might be a good idea to purge the squid cache

Archive
Archives


Contents

[edit] Geographical Survey Institute Link does not work well

Google Japan link for ja:大畑駅 works well. But Geographical Survey Institute Link for that place does not work well. Perhaps something wrong happens. Please check. Thank you. Penpen0216 05:26, 8 July 2007 (UTC)

The problem is caused by the fact that Geographical Survey Institute direct link URL does not have a separator between degree/minute/second. So when the minute or second has only 1 digit, the link messes up.
Current URL : http://watchizu.gsi.go.jp/watchizu.aspx?b=32953.75&l=1304715.8&r=1
Intended URL: http://watchizu.gsi.go.jp/watchizu.aspx?b=320953.75&l=1304715.8&r=1
The above lines demonstrate the problem. I tried to fix it with magic word "padleft", but it didn't work. Someone one else with better knowledge of this template or wiki code would have to fix it.--Voidvector 08:08, 8 July 2007 (UTC)
I didn't understand at first what the 0 was doing in the middle, but I now figured out that the service expects degrees, minutes and seconds concatenated together without any separators. Padleft didn't work because the coordinate variables aren't generated and filled in by MediaWiki, but by GeoHack, and so they're not available to MediaWiki functions. This needs a GeoHack fix indeed, to add left zero padded variables of two and three digits, or some multiuse variable where the necessary padding is given following some syntax. What would be understandable for GeoTemplate editors? --Para 18:35, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
If new minutes and seconds variables are introduced, i.e. creating 2 different variables for the same thing, some people might freak out and not know which one to use. I think multiuse version (e.g. a padleft function) would be nice. This way they are kept separated. --Voidvector 19:07, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
Would it be a problem if we padded all seconds and minutes variables so that their value would go from 00-60?
I don't think that would look too good and it might break some services. It wouldn't be consistent either, unless degrees were displayed padded as well, where the ±180 limit would force 1° shown as 001°. I agree with Voidvector that new separate variables would add unnecessary confusion. How about allowing sprintf format strings at the end of parameter names, like {latmindec,%02d} ? That would again make it more complicated than simple search&replace though. --Para 00:33, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Navbar

I added a makeshift navbar to help rectify the need to scroll a long TOC. It would be great if someone could prettify it. Andy Mabbett 16:10, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

I think we should remove the __TOC__. What do you guys think? --Steinninn 13:54, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
I've switched to a limited-depth TOC (after first re-arranging the sub-sections). If people like that, rather than the previous, longer, version, the navbar (currently commented-out) can go. Andy Mabbett 14:57, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
I liked it better when it was a horizontal TOC. But then again, people are much more familiar with the vertical one. --Steinninn 17:22, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Geolinks:Cityscale

I have managed to find a way to get the Geolinks:Cityscale template to pass the name of the location to this page as the final parameter. How can this now be used as a title param for the third party links? --Scotthatton 17:47, 12 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Sites without coordinates links

The previous split between sites with direct links and those that don't use coordinates made it easier to identify the first group. The advantage of having a section with sites that don't provide such links was that it avoided everybody else to figure out why they are not listed in the main section. Personally, I'd prefer to restore the separate section for those links or comment out any site that doesn't provide coordinate based links. -- User:Docu

Such links are currently in sparate sections anyway, but perhaps Docu (talk · contribs) could explain how that could be done while still providing a TOC, like that currently in use, which reduces the need for scrolling? Andy Mabbett 08:49, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Shaded Relief

I found a great site with world wide rleif mapping alongwith google and live maps. Can someone try to add http://www.shaded-relief.com/ to the list -- PlaneMad|YakYak 06:00, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

I can't seem to see any way to pass coordinates to it. Andy Mabbett 08:37, 14 July 2007 (UTC)
e.g. http://www.shaded-relief.com/?lat=30.0571&lng=31.2272&z=8&t=1&q=Cairo
lat : Latitude
lng : Longitude
z : Zoom
t : Type (0=Map, 1=Satellite, 2=Hybrid, 3=Relief, 4=Relief+, 5=Natural, 6=Natural+, 7=VE)
q : SearchQuery
Cush 17:31, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Template:GeoTemplate/Lang

This template is not perfect. I have not been able to figure out how to include type and region. --Steinninn 20:42, 14 July 2007 (UTC)

What are its perceived advantages, over putting the interwiki links in the left hand column, where people will expect to find them, as on most other pages? Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 09:36, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
The Geohack script doesn't support left column interwiki links. If you look at the current Wikipedia page, it has a few interwiki links on the side, but if you look at this page, the links aren't there. --Voidvector 12:34, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
Voidvector is right. This works similar to commons interwiki links. --Steinninn 17:04, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the explanation. I'm still unclear about the relationship between this template and the GeoHack page, despite having asked for clarification previously. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 21:10, 15 July 2007 (UTC)
To me, it is unclear what you do not understand. The normal interwiki link the templates together. These new interwiki's link the toys together. These are two different things. I think it's just as important to be able to jump from one language to the other while using the toy as it is in the template. --Steinninn 01:57, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
My latter request for clarification has nothing to do with interwikis. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 10:15, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
If you know how to put these links on the left hand column, them tell me. But my letter has still not been answered. How can we include type and region in the links? --Steinninn 11:52, 16 July 2007 (UTC)
The connection between this template "GeoTemplate" and the php script "GeoHack" is that every time GeoHack is used (i.e. someone click on a link to GeoHack), GeoHack reads a copy of GeoTemplate, and replace the {tags} with results of calculation. The reason we store the content in GeoTemplate is that it retrains the everybody-edits feature of a wiki, while GeoHack perform the actual calculation and page creation (the kind wiki can't do). --Voidvector 18:50, 16 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] MSN link spam

Seems to me there are a few of people who like to add MSN links to every region there is. Sounds very much like link spam to me. --Voidvector 02:49, 19 July 2007 (UTC)

The reason for those multiple links is because the URL for MSN Maps uses different region codes. The link provided under the Global systems heading uses the World Atlas (2) region, which does not give display the more detailed maps that are available for locations in North America (0), Europe (1), Australia/New Zealand (3) and Brazil (4). Further details can be found below under the heading #MSN Maps links and region codes. -- Zyxw (talk) 20:46, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Language template

I recently moved the "language" template to the end of the page, under "see also", as it was moving more important content "below the fold" on smaller screens, and will only be used by a small percentage of this page's visitors. I indicated what I had done in my edit summery. My edit was quickly reverted, with no edit summary, in an edit marked as "minor"; I find such deceptive unacceptable. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 10:16, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

I do agree that the revert was unnecesary. But I don't agree that the tamplate should be at the bottom. At Wikimedia Commons these kinds of themplates are at the top. And I think, when we get more language links we will eventually have more then 50% of the visitors that find these links usefull. And I don't believe that we get more links by having it at the bottom. Recently we got 2 links in 4 days. I suspect that number to fall fast if we move the template. --Steinninn 11:38, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
Maybe we should make the template smaller. But if we start that, we should also remember to do the same edit on the other 9 templates on the other wikipedia sites. --Steinninn 11:52, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
Smaller would indeed be better. A specific section with those links should do. Users on wikipedias in other languages where a specific page is available are (or should already be) directed to the specific pages. -- User:Docu

How about improving GeoHack to read standard interwiki information from the GeoTemplate page, or parse some language template if absolutely necessary, and then display the links the same way Monobook does? There is plenty of empty space in the traditional Monobook interwiki link box location in GeoHack, after all. --Para 20:51, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Para's idea is a much better solution then the current one. If anyone could find a way to do that. I tried contacting Egil for some help, but aparently he's busy in real life. I don't know how to write stuff like this, so we are going to have to find one that dose. --Steinninn 16:21, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
You can also try contact User:Magnus Manske, he hosts the current version of the GeoHack. If we can get him or any of the developers to participate on this discussion page it would be great, because there are a number of problems with the current system right now.
  1. The current system cannot produce digits with zero padding. This is required for at least 1 link I know.
  2. The current system doesn't populate some variables such as type and region, even though it uses them as part of its calculation.
  3. Some users wants to be able to pass names to the mapping website. Some websites can use this for better pinpointing or labeling.
--Voidvector 10:47, 24 July 2007 (UTC)
I added a new topic below to talk of modifications that require not just a GeoTemplate modification, but modifications to the GeoHack php: #GeoHack improvements. The last two of your items are already mentioned, but I'm not sure how the first is a problem. --Para 09:52, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
The first problem actually arose from Template_talk:GeoTemplate#Geographical_Survey_Institute_Link_does_not_work_well above. --Voidvector 16:25, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Coor templates

As {{coor at dm}} and {{coor at dms}} are templates suggested to use on wikipedia, there isn't really a reason not to include them or even to remove them ([1], [2]). I took the liberty to add them back. --User:Docu

(Previous comment by Docu (talk · contribs)) The reason for removing them is that they don't do anything which {{coord}} (which also "suggested for use on Wikipedia - and what a redundant phrase that is!) does not do; but lack the latter's additional functionality, including offering the viewer a choice of display format, and including a Geo microformat (this has been explained to you before, more than once). There is no good reason to include them alongside coord; to do so simply bloats the page, and is likely to confuse readers and editors by offering superfluous choices. They should be removed. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 16:35, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
(Previous comment by Pigsonthewing (talk · contribs)): why remove the user's choice of templates? To simplify viewing, you may want to move the {{coord}} ones to a subpage. -- User:Docu
The user has the same choice of templates as before; it's simply redundant to offer that choice here, for the reasons given above. Your unhelpful comment about moving the cord examples appears to be part of your ongoing and bizarre campaign against the use of that template, for reason - if any - you have yet to make clear. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 16:51, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
(Previous comment by Pigsonthewing (talk · contribs)): If you remove it, there is no choice. BTW isn't there an error in the way coord was added? -- User:Docu
I'm not here to play your games.Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 16:55, 22 July 2007 (UTC)
(Previous comment by Pigsonthewing (talk · contribs)): I don't understand your comment, but thank you for fixing your addition of coord [3] anyways. Looks like it needed some serious fixes. -- User:Docu

How is wiki markup information useful on a page linking to sources outside Wikipedia? In my opinion they should all be removed. --Para 20:53, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

There are some wikis that use them as input! -- User:Docu
Various coordinate templates are used in wikis for coordinate entry, yes, but GeoTemplate should be used only after someone clicks a link produced by the coordinate entry templates. What use is there to display some possible wikitext entry formats after the data has already been entered and is being used through GeoHack? If someone wants to see how coordinates can be entered, they should go to the article they came from, or a manual of style or a project page related to coordinates. There should be nothing parsing GeoHack's output in mass, that'd be misuse of resources. --Para 17:41, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
"misuse of resources" - can you provide a citation for that claim, or did you make it up? Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 19:59, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
Are we talking about the same thing? I would have thought it to be obvious that automated requests to a php script that fetches a rarely changing Wikipedia page on every request just to fill in a template that anyone could do locally is a waste of resources. Is that actually being done somewhere as input to a wiki?? There must be some misunderstanding here, where is it? --Para 20:17, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
So, no citation then; "misuse" is just your personal spin. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 22:27, 23 July 2007 (UTC)
Geolinks can be called from any language. It happens that I find coordinates on an article in another language. There is nothing automated about this. Anyways, I think we get carried away. Special:Cite offers all kinds of formats without problems. -- User:Docu
That's a viable use case indeed, thank you for explaining what Andy failed to do. Do you often find yourself copying coordinates from another wiki? If so, there's work for an interwiki bot to copy coordinates back and forth between Wikipedias in different languages. Have any such bots been run lately? --Para 07:29, 24 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Redesign?

I've always found this map hack along with the ISBN page to be horribly confusing. It is cluttered up with unnecessary link. Does not provide an easy visual way of determining of what each of the services have available. And the discussion and edit links are the wrong place.

The page should be similar to a disambiguation page, providing only the link where the user wants to go. Should have a tablish layout (possibly similar to another map hack [4]). And barrow more the interface elements from Wikipedia, possibly even the sidebar to put links that don't fit on the page. —Dispenser 03:27, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

It's alarming that another map link service has been forked. Our GeoTemplate is obviously not serving people well enough, so redesign is a good idea. The Dutch site is indeed more clear, but I think such a table wastes too much space with the map, satellite and hybrid links presented in that way. Here's some ideas I've thought of that might make the page more usable:
  • Currently the coordinates and scale appear as the first thing on the page, with a huge 140% font, taking half the screen space already. Since most people come to GeoHack for the links, the coordinates could be put in a little box in the corner of the page.
  • Something shorter to replace the "Find this location", icon(s) maybe?
  • Icons for map, satellite and hybrid links. Perhaps also icons for the services themselves? All of them would of course need alternative texts, or more.
  • Use a template to enter the links to have them all consistent. Elements could be the name wikilinked or not, type, link, icon, notes. Currently there seems to also be a link to each service's original description page.
There's also work in progress to add functionality to GeoHack to place the relevant sections first together with the global one, depending on the coordinates in the request. For that the design of the sections would have to be narrow enough so that two columns of links could be fit in one screen. What else could be improved? --Para 11:53, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
The coordinates are to big, I agree, but they should still be clearly visable, not just in the corner. I think an icon for a link is not a such a good idea, people are used to the idea of images being links to the images page, not an external link. A redesign is clearly needed. --Steinninn 17:08, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
If there is to be a redesign, I'd like to see accessibility considerations taken into account; not least the use of unique linking text. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 14:21, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

I've download Magnus' and created a sandbox template, you can check out the output to see how it looks. —Dispenser 21:59, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

To me there doesn't seem to be much difference from this sandbox template and the original, mostly that you have taken out a lot of other useful links. I do like the table, maybe we should do that with all the links. --Steinninn 22:13, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
I was trying to applying disambiguation pages standard which states the page is to help people find the information they want quickly and easily. Anyway your feel to edit it how you see fit. —Dispenser 22:37, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
Sorry I miss-interrupting you, I should have mention that I only included a small subset to make editing easier. —Dispenser 22:43, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
Good work, now everyone can set up their own proposition for how a section could be redesigned, without having to mess with this "production" template yet. Hopefully you will be ready to play with the underlying code as well and quick to apply patches, as Voidvector had some propositions above and there are other changes in the works too. --Para 22:40, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
First off, I don't know php, but I manage to hack in (with a ugly hack) the language sidebar. I've also added 'q' parameter to be passed along into the text. So it should at least be possible to experiment with some things. —Dispenser 02:29, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Templated table with icons

I liked the templated table with icons but the logo's might be copyright violations. I love the language sidebar! --Steinninn 00:26, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

As nice as they look they're horrible for accessibility reason (see {{ClickA}} documentation) and as a another noted users may expect the link to take them to the image page. I may be able to hack something in the post processor, but it would increase the learning curve—Dispenser 20:59, 28 July 2007 (UTC)
Since it's kind of out of the Wikipedia part (the wikipedia logo isn't there as well as other things) I'm guessing that most people will stop thinking about Wiki elements and see it as a "normal webpage" where images are usually useful links. Especially when there are a lot of these images. --Steinninn 01:13, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
Another thing, it would be nicer that the php would recognize the regular interwiki links and change them into our interwiki links. --Steinninn 01:23, 29 July 2007 (UTC)
Agreed, this was proposed below. --Para 23:55, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
The Click template generates some ugly html indeed, but that's just an ugly workaround for a proof of concept that MediaWiki won't allow by simpler means. Otherwise I don't see accessibility issues with the map/satellite/hybrid icons. How could an icon image and a map link be tagged so that post processing can combine them to a simple <a><img></a> set? The GeoTemplate page doesn't have to look exactly the same as it does after GeoHack, but it does have to stay editable without too many requirements, while still being valid with the post processing for all Wikipedias. How about requiring to use a template for the whole table or other structure, or to give more design freedom, use a template for a single service type (something like {{satellitelink|url=foo}}), where the template must provide the icon image and the link wrapped in a span element with an appropriate class, so that the contents can be combined? Or would having GeoHack modify the page in such a way be too non-wiki, since the current post processing of the page content is simple search and replace only, and we should just use the output MediaWiki has to offer?
On the issue of the service provider icons; I don't like them either, they take too much attention, don't help in making the page look consistent and don't really serve as identification which is what I originally intended them for. The whole Info column is a bit unfinished: I couldn't think of any good symbol or text other than the name of the service to use to link to the wiki article or the service's own description page, so I ended up using the inappropriate question mark. It doesn't give much hint on what the link leads to. I think the name of the service in the first column should not link anywhere as it used to serve the "Map" link function earlier, and is ambiguous anyway. Superscript links might be good, though to make them understandable they'd have to be fairly long. Also, the Notes column is a big waste of space and I don't think much of the text in the current GeoTemplate is too useful, as users really need to check each service themselves to see if they're of any use. Are there more ways we could use to describe the services other than free form text? Anyhow, to summarise, I think the Info and Notes columns should be dropped from the proposition. That would make the sections quite narrow and allow two to be floated side by side on most screens. --Para 23:55, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
Dispenser changed the link icons to be displayed through CSS, so that people without CSS see text links. This requires no magic post processing or invisible hints, I like it! To not add more work for GeoHack's maintainer, could the styles be added to MediaWiki:Common.css or should a MediaWiki:GeoTemplate.css be created? --Para 16:56, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
I've created {{GeoTemplate/sandbox/main.css}} for now, we may need to to MediaWiki namespace if full protection is desired or we could semi-protect it.

[edit] Redesign sub-section 1

As it stands now, I'm also concerned that accessibility seems to have been disregarded, rather than improved. There are empty alt attributes, no accessible table mark-up, I realise that some of these issues may be symptoms of problems with Wiki mark-up, but there must be at least some work-arounds that could be included. I suggest running an improved version of the proposed design(s) past some accessibility exerts, perhaps at http://www.accessifyforum.com/ Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 20:11, 30 July 2007 (UTC)

What is accessible table mark-up? --Para 23:55, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
accessible table mark-up. Also, please don't move my comments under misleading sub-headings. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 11:23, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm not sure what you're after. It seems you're commenting that the tables generated by MediaWiki aren't accessible enough. It would make no sense to fix that in GeoHack, as such a change should affect all Wikipedia tables. Icons however, which generally aren't used in Wikipedia with accessible markup, could be implemented with a workaround in GeoHack. --Para 11:49, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
Which is why I wrote: "I realise that some of these issues may be symptoms of problems with Wiki mark-up, but there must be at least some work-arounds that could be included. " Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 13:44, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
Andy are you using a validation service or are you looking through the source its self since there are thing the service doesn't change (1:30000 is spoken as 1 colon 30000 instead of 1 to 30000, at least in Opera). I fixed the markup so it almost validates as XHTML strict (stupid lang box hack). Its been passing the lynx test for sometime now. Perhaps you could design a layout to add to the list, I'm really interested in seeming some other design. —Dispenser 18:07, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
Accessibility != validation. You could fix "1:30000" with an abbr element, were such allowed. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 13:48, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Rules/Guidelines on links

I believe it would be wise to have stated/remind somewhere of what links are allowed. Here are my suggestions:

  • External links should take the reader to a place with information relevant to that location. [5]
  • Editors should not be hesitant to remove dead links, as they provide no value.
  • Use few link as possible. Preferably designed like a disambiguation page.
  • Also there is no reason why we need to include pages to the front page of the site.
Agreed, but we should link to an information page about the service if one exists, for details about supported url parameters and such. --Para 08:24, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

We should probably also include a few exerts from the official linking policy. —Dispenser 16:55, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

I could only think of one more:

  • Service names shouldn't link anywhere because it's not obvious where the link leads (place with information relevant to the location, wiki article, service info page). --Para 08:24, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Can we have openstreetmap.org linked in the table there? This page can feed through lat/long/zoom information to an openstreetmap URL such as http://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=51.52753&mlon=-0.080499&zoom=14 -- Harry Wood 13:58, 10 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Redesign and WikiMiniAtlas

I propose that the redesigned geohack page include an embedded (non-popup) WikiMiniAtlas viewport with the redesigned data below. Our own mapping service should take precedence, even though alternative sites provide value to the readers as well. --Gmaxwell 17:27, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

That seems reasonable, but how large (in pixels and file size) would it be? And what would users with no Javascript see? Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 18:30, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
Hopefully the non-javascript users will see a collapsed div. And could the box be made resizeable like the way safari does textareas in the 3.x version and remember it (via cookies) for the next time? Also, should I import a /geohack.js in my version? —Dispenser 23:05, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
Y Done, I hacked something in, it can't be resizeable since the URL requires a viewport size. Maybe this should be filed as a bug with the wikiminiatlas people? —Dispenser 00:53, 19 August 2007 (UTC)
the wikiminiatlas people, that would be me :-). After some server-side optimizations this will be my top priority. In fact the only thing keeping this from working is the fact that setting initial zoomlevel does not work yet. --Dschwen 12:51, 22 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] GeoHack improvements

To go together with the GeoTemplate redesign, GeoHack could use some changes too so it's best to talk them through. Feel free to add comments in between.

  • Interwiki sidebar. To keep everything as much wiki-like as possible, the interwiki links in GeoTemplate should be given as anywhere else in Wikipedia, without using any special templates or having to specify each and every possibly useful parameter. GeoHack retrieves the MediaWiki parsed html containing the interwikis in the p-lang element, where the languages and codes can easily be extracted, and a similar interwiki box created using the parameter line from the original unparsed request with only the language= parameter changed. --Para 09:52, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
There seems to be some efforts to reinvent the wheel with Template:GeoTemplate/Lang and Template:GeoTemplate/Lang/sandbox. This looks very complicated and pointless really, since MediaWiki already provides a fine interwiki box created from the interwiki markup everyone knows. Why not use it? All GeoHack has to do is take the p-lang element of the GeoTemplate page, iterate through every list item and change the link from "http://(\w+).wikipedia.org/.*" to "http://tools.wikimedia.de$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']&lang=$lang", where $lang was captured from the interwiki list item. Then just place the box where it belongs, and all language names, ids and parameters generated by MediaWiki will be retained as such without creating any magic templates with odd markup. Simple, easy. Yea? --Para 22:12, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
I was being bold. I thought it was a good idea that the template recognizes in what language it's working in to make it bold (or not include it at all). If you know how to improve it even more with the suggestion, Be bold --Steinninn 22:37, 31 July 2007 (UTC)
It was easier said then done, at least for me. I ended up replacing parts of the URL since regex seem to be too CPU hungry for this script. But on the upside you can now specify the page to parse. —Dispenser 00:17, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
Y Done Works perfectly, thanks! The code can always be prettified later when all these features are combined to the "production" GeoHack (for example by using request_uri or query_string with &language replaced, instead of using {params}, to support any current and future url parameter such as &title). --Para 06:58, 1 August 2007 (UTC)
Could a diff of this feature be prepared as soon as possible for patching GeoHack proper? People seem to be working on other Wikipedias to start using the workaround template, and it's all for nothing really. --Para 19:46, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
My code should be available from the page its self [6]. The main changes are on the lines containing $template and $langbar, but I'm not sure if it'll be easy to merge with the main one since I changed the structure of the page to better match the output of mediaWiki. —Dispenser 22:32, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
  • GeoTemplate sections. There's work in progress for GeoHack to be able to move the sections related to the requested coordinates to the top of the page automatically depending on country border polygons. For that the sections would need to be named in a predictable manner in all languages. Since MediaWiki doesn't seem to allow creating html anchors other than with the =heading= syntax, I suggest that we name all the sections as ===ISO country code=== to have predictable html anchors, and modify GeoHack to translate the codes of the headings into country names using the language requested, while still preserving the anchors. The names can be their default translations (defined in ...?), or in case something needs to be different, translated using a Wikipedian created translation table on each of the GeoTemplate pages. This may lead into problems with busy small areas that use a "local" map service of a bigger area, or with small areas that don't have their own country code but have good map services for that small area only. It would only a problem with sections that span over the length of a single screen, though. If we were building the html from scratch and thought of ease of coding, it would of course be good to have div elements with the ISO ids, but that would require special markup on the GeoTemplate page, and for ease of editing I think we should keep it as close to other wiki pages as possible and use the standard heading markup which is then only extended by GeoHack. --Para 09:52, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Take a look at {{anchor}}. And wouldn't it be more preferable to to give each of the services a coordinate and range in which they're valid? Then we could sort them by proximity. —Dispenser 16:46, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
It might be if countries were defined as a centre point and radius, but unfortunately they are more complicated than that. Using predefined border data solves the problem. You have some point there though, as not all "global" services are useful everywhere. We would need some way to score them, not on people's preferences but depending on the service's quality at each of the local sections. I haven't figured out a way to format that in an editable way.
For the anchor thing, an identifier like that could be placed in a templated design, like to the one I just wrote in the sandbox. There may be some concerns doing that though, as it's be best to have the GeoTemplate page as requirement-free as possible so people can easily edit it, especially when the translated pages drift further away from the English Wikipedia. If we rely on something else than section names (or codes) as used everywhere else on wiki, all GeoTemplate editors will have to remember to include the required elements, which may not even be visible in preview so they won't notice anything wrong if something is forgotten. The choice of section formatting will have to take this into account, in addition to the eventual GeoHack implementation of the moving, which will probably rely on an identifier of some level, and move everything from that point until the next identifier of the same level. --Para 11:56, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
Y Done See http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2007-October/030214.html. --Para 21:28, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Coordinate title. Some map services support a name for the requested location, which can be shown as the title of the page or on the map with the placemark. I can think of two ways to have automatic titles:
    • Wikipedia could provide a title to GeoHack with &title={{PAGENAME}} added to {{Coor URL}} (which is what all coordinate templates use to link to GeoHack). Most coordinates here could be named this way after the article, but some articles contain inline coordinates as well that point to a smaller location within the article's main area, or to a related location. In that case it would be a problem if all uses of coordinates automatically gave the name of the page as the title, unless GeoHack was modified to override the &title= if a _title: paremeter has been specified. Alternatively, we could just define &title as the title of the page the user came from since http referer is not reliable, and leave it at that. --Para 09:52, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Y Done in Template:Coor URL. --Para 21:28, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
    • The coordinate templates could be modified to add the pagename when the coordinates are to be shown at the top of the page. For inline coordinates there is a proposal for coord to be modified to take a name parameter, originally thought for microformat use, but as an identifier the value might as well be used for &title too. Then (with confusing naming), coordinates that go to the article's title would automatically be &title={{PAGENAME}}, and inline coordinates &title={{{name}}} if a name has been given. Personally I think this is the cleanest solution. --Para 09:52, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Y Done See Template:Coord#Usage. --Para 21:28, 12 October 2007 (UTC)
  • Uses the significance of the figures (sigfigs) of the coordinates to determine the appropriate scale if the scale is not otherwise defined. —Dispenser 06:32, 24 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Co-ordinates for polar locations

Copied from Template talk:Coord by Carcharoth 13:56, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

I recently tried to look up Concordia Station by following the co-ord link and selecting Google Maps. Unfortunately, Google Maps uses a cylindrical projection and Antarctica and the polar regions are horribly distorted (as seen here and here). Is there any way to fix this, either at Google Maps/Google Earth's end (ie. display the polar regions as seen in these images: Antarctica and Arctic), to to fix the co-ord template to take the reader to a different map if the latitude value is above or below a certain value? Carcharoth 12:57, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

That'd be a question for Google, but the answer would probably be no. In our end it should be treated as any other location that isn't well covered in the global services, by finding a local one that serves the area better, and then create a section for it in Template:GeoTemplate. So the real question is if anyone knows a map service for Antarctica where a location can be linked directly in the URL. --Para 13:14, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
Thanks. Once a section appears at that template, would the co-ord link currently at Concordia Station get changed to point directly to that section, or do we rely on the reader to find it themselves. Most readers will try the Google Maps link, then give up. Carcharoth 13:19, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
At the moment, no, unfortunately. You will have to click on the table of contents to get to the links. Work is however in progress to have GeoHack place the global section and relevant local section first on the page, depending on which area the requested coordinates are in. That should make it easy enough to find a recommended service for the location. --Para 13:32, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
I'm not clear what this - and the following issue - have to do with {{coord}}; you may find a better solution by asking elsewhere: perhaps Template talk:GeoTemplate Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 13:28, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
Co-ord is the most visible use of geographical templates. It is the link many people click on, so I thought I'd find the quickest answers here. And I did. At the moment, the issue is that the co-ord link at Concordia Station is useless, and I thought that the people working on this template would like to be aware of the issues. Does that answer your question? I will also raise this at Template talk:GeoTemplate, but if you really want to channel talk from here to there, why not put a notice at the top of this page? Carcharoth 13:39, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
(end copied discussion)
I;ve just replied to your latter post at the original location. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 14:18, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
  • Is this the right location for the discussion? Any ideas on what should be done about linking to maps of polar regions? Carcharoth 13:56, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Co-ordinates for boundaries

Copied from Template talk:Coord by Carcharoth 13:56, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

Template:Coor d Antarctic - used in Antarctic territorial claims and Antarctica, and is absolutely useless there. If you click the links and look them up on maps, you learn very little. What is informative is the the maps showing the boundaries of the territories. Using co-ord to pinpoint a single location works well, but using co-ord to indicate boundaries is a bad idea, or at least needs to be improved. You want a function where a set of co-ords takes you to a mapping site like Google Earth and draws the boundaries on a map for you. Is this possible? This could be very exciting for drawing maps of old countries, or showing where those countries were in relation to modern countries. Carcharoth 13:08, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

(end copied discussion)
  • Is this the right location for the discussion? Any ideas on whether drawing boundaries using co-ords is feasible or even desirable? Carcharoth 13:56, 25 July 2007 (UTC)
Someone may be able to write a mapplet for it, but that would only support 1 service (Google or whichever service he uses). --Voidvector 08:15, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] What happened to direct Google Earth link?

I don't think the Geody link is really a good substitute -- Google Earth is so prominent that it should really be called out by name. That doesn't mean the Geody link shouldn't also be there -- I don't think a little minor redundancy here is a problem. --Trovatore 20:31, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

There's two of them just a few rows below the Geody one. Did you miss it because it was too far down, or because it wasn't in the first section? If you have ideas on how to improve the page in general and not for any single service only, there's a redesign topic just above. --Para 20:42, 1 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Useless for me

Apparently the page have changed. When I went to the page http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/geo/geohack.php?params=50_49_2.05_N_4_37_32.35_E_scale:6000 I got a page with texts overlayed which is useless for me. I use Safari on Macintosh. A partial screendump is on http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Geopage_does_not_work.jpg. What to do? --Wouterhagens 20:54, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

I'm getting the same thing, also on Safari, Apple. It's probably going to change when we start using the redesign. --Steinninn 21:59, 3 August 2007 (UTC)
This is an old "bug" that has reemerged. See here for previous discussion and a hack that patched it: [7] The root of the problem appears to be caused by different CSS stylesheets being used at wikimedia.de and wikipedia.org. If we are to re-apply the hack, we may as well add a do-not-remove sign within comment tags. —Tokek 17:39, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
It's almost fixed, but the TOC limit doesn't work, I tried it on Firefox, and it's the same story there. It's on the right, but very long. How does it look on IE? --Steinninn 18:25, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
I created a template {{TOCgeohack}} based on the flat list TOC that is still commented out in the template. I'll insert it now. --Steinninn 18:36, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
Looks good. I would put it where the language menu is; move the language menu to the footer, and mention the language options in the TOC. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 18:55, 10 August 2007 (UTC)
I don't agree, and anyway, soon there's going to be a new interwiki section on the left side that everyone should be happy about. --Steinninn 10:24, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
The TOClimit problems stems from geohack importing only base monobook skin and nothing else. If you viewed using my version it'll look more like how it looks at WP, since I've import more style sheets. I also can only presume that the apple users were using safari 2.x since on the windows 3.x these problems did not occur. Also as a side note for those hacking on the language bar in this version, It should be possible to using CSS position the a pseudo-language bar on the left. —Dispenser 16:55, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
Off topic: Since we are putting the language bar on the left, can we also have the "[ Discuss ] [ Usage ] [ Edit ]" at the top?
Well the Special pages don't have that. Probably the easiest way is to use a CSS hack. —Dispenser 23:05, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
Do you know how do use the CSS hack. I sure as hack don't. --Steinninn 01:41, 23 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Passing decimal values

Links to Magnus' tool use coordinates with Northings and Westings, thus:

http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/geo/geohack.php?params=52.548_N_1.932_W_region:GB_type:city

Is it possible to construct a similar link, but with decimal values, like:

http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/geo/geohack.php?params=52.548_-1.932_region:GB_type:city

(which doesn't work); perhaps by adding an extra parameter? Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 19:01, 7 August 2007 (UTC)

So you asking if we could get ride the direction indicator or that we could use 52.548 N -1.932 E? —Dispenser 16:55, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
I'm asking only whether there is a way to pass the parameters in decimal format, as in my second example. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 17:01, 11 August 2007 (UTC)
Can the direction indicator be eliminated? (SEWilco 16:14, 16 August 2007 (UTC))
I found the function which parse the coordinate (get_coor ( )), there a comment near the top stating that semi-colons can seperate the two values. e.g. 52.548;-1.932_region:GB_type:city. —Dispenser 23:05, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
Splendid. Thank you. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 00:06, 17 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Map sources for multiple coordinates

In the revision page is a section for Map sources for multiple coordinates. Is there a reason to not add that section? Would that section not function when the page is accessed as a single coordinate? If that is the case, can a separate page be created for multiple coordinates? (SEWilco 16:17, 16 August 2007 (UTC))

The section works with any coordinates where the pagename of the containing article is passed to GeoHack, be the contents single or multiple coordinates. A separate page shouldn't be necessary, though the name of the section may need some rewording as the links are applicable for all coordinates. --Para 17:12, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
So it does not work when the pagename is not passed to GeoHack. When does that happen? (SEWilco 17:21, 16 August 2007 (UTC))
Right now with all coordinate templates. With {{coord}} until the editprotected request is fulfilled, and it can easily be added to the other templates as well. --Para 17:39, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
For the benefit of anyone not already familiar with that proposal, it should not be fulfilled, because it is faulty, as described. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 18:35, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
So if the multiple coordinates section is broken for all coordinate templates, why not add a GeoHackMultiple page which is oriented toward multiple coordinates? When a page name is given with no single coordinate, presenting single coordinates links makes no sense. (SEWilco 22:15, 16 August 2007 (UTC))
There's nothing preventing this from happening with my additions, just specify the page name with the &template= parameter. —Dispenser 23:05, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
The "production" GeoHack has the &title parameter already, doesn't it? That's what the current multiple coordinates section relies on. It would however make sense to have a separate parameter for cases where an editor wishes to have something more specific as the coordinate title than the pagename. To not overload &title, perhaps a &pagename parameter could be added, with the only functionality to replace {pagename} with it, and {title} as well if &title hasn't been given. --Para 17:27, 17 August 2007 (UTC)
Nope. Giving an article title to GeoHack [8] only produces the same list of services for single coordinates. (SEWilco 22:07, 18 August 2007 (UTC))
It makes sense when the method of entry is through one of the coordinates, which is the standard in Wikipedia. Whether a set contains one or more coordinates is such a small difference for services that support multiple coordinates, that it's not worth forking our list of geographical information services and the related GeoHack script in two. The section is broken only until the templates are modified to pass the pagename, and the edit is trivial with all templates. --Para 23:17, 16 August 2007 (UTC)
The past inability of Wikipedia to access multiple coordinates is a deficiency and limitation, not a standard. (SEWilco 21:50, 18 August 2007 (UTC))
The reason not to add it (as I thought you understood and, indeed, agreed) is that the page is about a single waypoint. The link may work, purely technically, but would be confusing to users. A separte page is needed for that reason. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 18:35, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] A little server problem

"Unable to connect … to the server at tools.wikimedia.de." I'm sure that will be working soon. (SEWilco 18:49, 22 August 2007 (UTC))

The server is still up, but they seem to be updating the OS. --Dschwen 19:04, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
A more accurate term then would be "The server is still on". It might be lit up but the heat it is generating is of little use to us. (SEWilco 19:44, 22 August 2007 (UTC))
 :-). The still working SSH login is of use to me. Anyway, apache seems to be working again. Plus I thought it might be interesting to know it's maintnance and not a fatality... --Dschwen 19:51, 22 August 2007 (UTC)
For the benefit of less technical readers, "apache working" means the web services are again working. (SEWilco 20:54, 22 August 2007 (UTC))

[edit] Table of contents

is there a reason there isnt a table of contents? Blacksmith talkEditor Review 02:06, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Probably because it's a very long list of contents. Are there any objections about having it? --Steinninn 05:15, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

hmm im just thinking it might be easier to navigate with one, but i wonder if theres a way to have the TOC only showing certain degrees of headings. e.g ==heading== nut not ===heading=== so only the main headings are shown in toc.Blacksmith talkEditor Review 07:23, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

Sorry. I read there is a table of contents. Well. There is one, and it says Contents: Global... --Steinninn 09:50, 25 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Named coordinates

A while ago support was added to pass article names to map services along with the coordinates, but it turned out that some services have trouble with the Wikipedia names even when they're urlencoded. For example, Google Maps can't handle parentheses in the name, and the coordinate link from Pyramid Mountain (volcano) for example didn't work at all because of this Google bug. There are no doubt other services as well where a separator collides with a character used in our article names. Other than stopping to use names at all, I see the following solutions:

  1. Contact service providers to allow any character in the name as long as they're urlencoded
  2. Add a new name parameter to GeoHack, where all non-alphanumeric characters (on which alphabet?) have been stripped
  3. Go through the entire list of services, find out which characters are problematic, and add a new name parameter to GeoHack, where only these characters have been removed or replaced

Any others? --Para 00:16, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Both MapQuest and Live Maps work with regular HTML escaping (not sure about Google). So instead of underscores for spaces, how about percent 20's? Heptazane 16:25, 6 September 2007 (UTC)
Examples:
That can be done on the wiki side from Template:Coor URL, by replacing {{FULLPAGENAMEE}} with {{urlencode:{{FULLPAGENAME}}}}. It fixes Live support for multiword titles, since it uses underscore as a separator, but is otherwise just a cosmetic fix. --Para 16:24, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
The title is currently coming in with underscores, but Live Maps uses that as a separator, so it doesn't work properly. So even escaped underscores would be better... although escaped spaces would be ideal.Heptazane 16:26, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

How does one pass names to the current geohack.php at all? And how will they be passed to the new script when referencing the page from outside wikipedia? http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/geo/geohack.php?params=32.536942591894_N_44.422224120113_E_&title=Babylon ?? Cush 18:58, 23 September 2007 (UTC)

Hello? Why does the title feature *NOT* work? --Cush 20:11, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
Your link seems to work fine with the services that support a title. What did you expect to happen? What is this "new script"? --Para 21:08, 28 September 2007 (UTC)
I thought there was a new GeoTemplate coming up... anyways, no title is passed to the GoogleMap link. Cush 18:51, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
I tried putting the title in the last part of the Google Maps link ("q=Babylon") and although the specified coordinate was displayed, search results are provided which are not relevant in this case. That's probably why it is not being done. (SEWilco 20:00, 30 September 2007 (UTC))
Titles for Google Maps can be given in the format "q=latitude,longitude (Title)" and this template did pass the title until it was noticed that Google is buggy. I mentioned this in my first post to this topic already, but when there are parentheses in the title as many articles on Wikipedia have, Google gives an error and doesn't show the placemark at all. If you remove the opening bracket from within the title, the link works, but it's not possible to do that with MediaWiki functions. In my opinion it's more valuable to have a working placemark for all links than a title. --Para 22:49, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
Then why not just replace parentheses with square brackets? I do that in my own php scripts that are linking to GoogleMaps. http://maps.google.com/maps?spn=0.3,0.3&ll=25.097664945575,32.779510383797&t=k&q=25.097664945575,32.779510383797(Nekhen%20%5BHierakonpolis%5D)

Cush 19:53, 1 October 2007 (UTC)

Yes, that would be part of solution #3 above. Do all the services we link to support square brackets, and what other characters do they have problems with? What should those other characters be replaced with? What if it's an "essential" character that's not supported by some service, such as a comma? Will that character then be filtered for all services? What if the problematic service is a minor one, can we just ignore it? Do we need special case variables with different characters replaced or removed in each, or a variable syntax that tells which characters need to be replaced and with which? --Para 19:53, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
?? How to pass parameters to the respective url entirely depends on what the particular service accepts, right? Why would there have to be a mechanism for all instead of one mechanism per output link? All you have to figure out is how to feed the parameters all into the geohack.php, and then individual solutions for each linked site can be implemented pretty easily. Cush 21:56, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
I think he's muttering to himself about how to code a general solution within geohack. Obviously geohack has some general rules but needs code for some exceptions. The obvious solution is to test for a few special cases, each with their own substitutions, and use the existing code for everything else. Usually after coding several such special cases, patterns become apparent which can be handled with simplified generalized code. He's trying to create the generalized code now. (SEWilco 22:03, 1 October 2007 (UTC))
See what has happened so far with the similar #Geographical Survey Institute Link does not work well section, which would also needs an exception variable with something much simpler. Cush is proposing the addition of a special case variable along the lines of {titlegoogle} or {title_parentheses_as_squarebrackets}, and for the Live problem above perhaps a {title_underscores_as_spaces}. While creating separate variables one by one in GeoHack might work, it would be putting the work on the person maintaining the script. We already have GeoTemplate so that that single person doesn't need to be handling all the link changes, and I think we should follow the same principle here. It might of course be overkill if there's really only two services that have problems with our titles, but that's what we'd need to find out before any coding. --Para 09:46, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

I am proposing what? There is no need at all to change the parameters that are fed *into* the geohack.php, only the links that this script produces need to be adjusted. And what's this about the GeoTemplate? Cush 11:49, 2 October 2007 (UTC)

Ok, perhaps some explanation of GeoHack is in order. It takes two inputs: the coordinate data from Wikipedia coordinate templates in the http link, and the "link template" Template:GeoTemplate, where it replaces certain keywords ("variables") with values computed from the given data. If GeoHack is changed to process the data differently, the change will affect all uses of that variable. GeoHack does not handle html links, it handles keywords with a simple search & replace. Perhaps then you are suggesting that after all the replacing has been done, GeoHack should find every link on the page, filter out parentheses within parentheses from all Google links, and from Live links find the title from between all the separating underscores and replace underscores within the title with spaces, etc? --Para 12:26, 2 October 2007 (UTC)
Then add new keywords for GoogleMaps and Live in the GeoTemplate, and the geohack.php can subsequently perform the replacement of characters. 4 minutes max. Cush 21:01, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
Note that both MapQuest and Live Maps would benefit from having the title with escaped spaces rather than underscores. Heptazane (talk) 17:29, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] MapQuest {zoom} values

I have restored {zoom} to the MapQuest links in Template:GeoTemplate. It was removed in two edits on 11 July 2007, first changed to 9 in this edit and then to 7 in this edit. For those not familiar with this, the GeoTemplate can be supplied with a {type} that has an associated {scale}. For example, city is associated with a scale of 1 : 100,000 and landmark has a scale of 1: 10,000. The script uses that to calculate other scaling values: {mmscale} is used for Multimap, {span} for Google Maps, {altitude} for MSN Maps and {zoom} for MapQuest. These are documented at Template:GeoTemplate/doc#Scaling and calculated in mapsources.php. -- Zyxw 15:18, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

I also made this correction in Template:GeoTemplate/sandbox, which was created on 25 July 2007 and therefore picked up the previous changes to Template:GeoTemplate. -- Zyxw 15:53, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Parameters?

Can somebody please add a list of all possible parameters that can be passed to the geohack.php? Including lists of valid parameter values (i.e. for type). Cush 22:02, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

The input from Wikipedia articles is described on the project page for coordinates, Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates#Implementation details, and the input variables for map service links in GeoTemplate is linked at the top of this page and on GeoTemplate itself, Template:GeoTemplate/doc. --Para 10:33, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] What's going on?

Clicking on any coordinates in Wikipedia leads to this message "The tools by this user is deactivated. The author should email the roots." Cush 21:10, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Please read Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Mapping tool broken?. - Erik Baas 00:27, 27 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Wrong UTM zone of WGS84

E.g. Las Vegas is located at WGS84 UTM 11S; which should be 11N --cwb —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.154.250.75 (talk) 10:49, 5 November 2007 (UTC) Dallas has same problem 3629041 706044 14S should be 14N

Dallas should be 14S, going by Image:Utm-zones.jpg (see also Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system) -- Ratarsed (talk) 17:25, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Limited number of template uses per page?

Is the number of template uses in a page limited? Because on my user page the list of coordinates breaks down at the end and either "Template:Coord/display/inline" or "Template:Coord" are displayed instead of the clickable coordinates link to the geohack.php. Cush 23:07, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

There is a limit (2048000 bytes) to the total size of transcluded templates, so it depends not only on the number templates, but also on their size. This was in the source of your user page:
Pre-expand include size: 2047934 bytes
Post-expand include size: 689079 bytes
Template argument size: 608435 bytes
Maximum: 2048000 bytes

- Erik Baas 01:36, 8 November 2007 (UTC)

So what would I have to do? Cush 10:49, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
I think the only solution is to split it up into two or more separate pages. - Erik Baas 15:05, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
You can create subpages in userspace, such as User talk:Cush/Ancient Sites/Asia and then just put an index on your page. Your page will also load much faster. (SEWilco 15:08, 8 November 2007 (UTC))

[edit] Fy

Fy: is implementing coordinates more seriously now. How/where do I translated this page into Frysk/Frisian? Aliter 02:07, 10 November 2007 (UTC)

The way these pages are connecting may make the question above somewhat unclear: I'm asking about: http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/geo/geohack.php?pagename=No_title&params=0_N_0_E_. Aliter 23:25, 11 November 2007 (UTC)

You can translate the page to fy:Template:GeoTemplate, and make all coordinate links in the wiki point to the above url with &language=fy added (like has been done with de:Vorlage:KoordinateURL for example). --Para 00:02, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, I made a small page as a start, with a further link to the large English one. (A complete translation would go over our size limit anyway.)

There's always one more question, of course: Those types, can we get those localised somehow, or should we parse the value on the page and select the relevant translation based on that? Aliter 01:13, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

You can make them template parameters (|name=value) as localised names and values, which the template can then convert to GeoHack supported names and values. Or you can do what's been done on the German Wikipedia; enter the data twice, once for localised display and again for GeoHack. These parameter translations break machine readability across Wikipedias by making coordinate entry inconsistent, but I don't think there's been any effort on that anyway. --Para 17:16, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

I was merely trying to localise the type on the result page: where {type} is included, it's replaced by the type that was passed in. So I tried using {{#switch:{type}|city=bewenning|et=c.|oars: {type}}}. Unfortunately, this always hits the default value. I don't know what's wrong there, but for now we apparently have to accept a type in English on a page in Frisian. Aliter 01:35, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

Right. Then we have to ask what the type parameter is for: people or machines? It has been visible on GeoTemplate only for a few weeks [9] - before that only Wikipedia editors saw the parameter while editing articles. It would be possible to change the parameter support and make GeoHack understand more types, where many correspond to the same scale, or to just change the display and add a translation table chosen by the language parameter. But personally I think the GeoTemplate doesn't need to be showing other information of the coordinates than just the coordinates themselves, and that would be the easiest solution here. --Para 16:53, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Coordinates for Newland mistaken

Geog co-ordinates are wrong - for Newland Gloucestershire, not Newland Worcestershire. Neil, Bristol 82.32.33.113 12:40, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

Coordinates for both villiages fixed. This is not really the correct place to raise errors of data entry though. :) Oosoom Talk to me 13:46, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Don't say "Find this location" a million times

  • Find this location (Satellite, Hybrid) on Google Maps [1].
  • Find this location (Satellite, Hybrid) on MapQuest [2]. Roads and driving directions.
  • Find this location (Satellite, Hybrid) on Yahoo! Maps [3]

should be a table,

Find this location on:
Google Maps  Sat Hyb Sitepage
MapQuest     Sat Hyb Sitepage
Yahoo! Maps  Sat Hyb Sitepage

Or

Google Maps  Map Sat Hyb Sitepage
MapQuest     Map Sat Hyb Sitepage
Yahoo! Maps  Map Sat Hyb Sitepage

where the first word is not a link. Jidanni (talk) 20:13, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

You'll notice this was discussed at length above, with mostly the same results as you've lined out here. There are multiple proposals at Template:GeoTemplate/sandbox, but unfortunately the demo link to render them isn't working anymore. I put my own proposal as static html to GeoTemplate test with icons, what do you think? Incidentally, would anyone who understands CSS floating know how to make the local and global sections arrange themselves like in this screenshot, if there's enough screen space? --Para (talk) 18:55, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Don't say "Map of all coordinates in the article" without checking first

Don't say to the browser "Map of all coordinates in the article" unless you have first checked to see that you have been passed valid input! E.g., my http://jidanni.org/location/coordinates.html links to GeoTemplate, even if you didn't expect it to. Jidanni (talk) 20:26, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

But tools on the toolserver are for Wikimedia use, and all Wikimedia projects I know of that use the English GeoTemplate also pass a pagename. I don't think Wikimedia tools need to be adapted to general use that isn't from any Wikimedia project. Anyway, at the moment there's no functionality in GeoHack for selective display; the tool always gives the entire GeoTemplate. --Para (talk) 19:13, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Can the icon be removed?

Can the oversized and not-so-beautiful icon http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9a/Erioll_world.svg/18px-Erioll_world.svg.png be removed from coordinates? Or can it be resized to match the text size better? Maybe {{coor d|30.907223|N|30.665145|E|noicon}} or so? Cush (talk) 13:29, 23 November 2007 (UTC)

It could perhaps be scaled down a few pixels to match other inline icons at 10-15px. Any other change is subjective and should not be an editor choice. To change the settings for yourself only, see meta:WikiMiniAtlas#Configuration and discussion at Template talk:Coord/Archive 5#Globe icon and Template talk:Coord/Archive 5#It is hideous. Take it out. --Para (talk) 14:02, 23 November 2007 (UTC)
So will it be scaled down? Who can do this? Cush (talk) 09:40, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
Now what? Is there now a way to hide or at least change the ugly icon? Cush (talk) 16:32, 11 February 2008 (UTC)
On a related note, should GeoHack's page mention someplace that clicking on the globe icon will do something? At present many browsers only make the GeoHack hyperlink visible but it is not apparent that the icon has a hyperlink. (I omit the mouseover message because that is unlikely to be visible unless one suspects a link lurks) (SEWilco (talk) 16:02, 23 November 2007 (UTC))

[edit] UK national grid references and GeoHack

Two issues with GeoHack and British national grid references: one minor, one more major:

(1) Minor one first. UK grid positions are most often quoted as six-figure references, eg TQ 302797. GeoHack is giving ten figure references, eg TQ3016879678. This is fine, the extra precision is good. But for readability, a couple of extra spaces would be nice, to present the ten figure reference as two five figure groups, eg TQ 30168 79678. This also makes it much easier to instantly see the six figure reference contained within.

(2) More serious issue. I've also flagged this at WT:GEO. The GeoHack converter seems to be slightly off. The GeoHack converter seems to be consistently returning a grid reference a couple of hundred metres to the West and the North of where they should be. Eg 51°30′02″N, 00°07′28″W, just to the East of the clock tower of Big Ben in Westminster, gets converted to TQ 30168 79678, the intersection of Bridge Street and Parliament Square about 200m away. According to Streetmap.co.uk's converter [10], the correct conversion should be TQ 30281 79624.

Update: It's been suggested at WT:GEO that this may be because GeoHack is converting as from OSGB36 lat/longs, rather than the WGS84 it claims. Jheald (talk) 14:16, 25 November 2007 (UTC)
Thanks, Jheald (talk) 09:46, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Geohack.php refuses to process the double quote character, %22 -- barf spew ensues...

See my note in the Village Pump. I discovered accidentally that the toolserver URL generates a spew of warnings when the %22 is present in the pagename parameter value.

[11] --Mareklug talk 04:13, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Reported at https://jira.ts.wikimedia.org/browse/MAGNUS-33. --Para (talk) 09:59, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Great Britain first

Why is the "Great Britain" section now before the Global Systems?? Who the heck needs coordinates in Great Britain?? Cush (talk) 22:46, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Someone edited the template to do that but it looks like a mistake. I think that will be fixed soon by someone. (SEWilco (talk) 23:54, 26 November 2007 (UTC))

[edit] Additional coordinate systems

Can we add MGRS and Maidenhead coordinates to this template? --  Denelson83  00:37, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

Well? Is this going to be implemented? --  Denelson83  21:45, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
It would be good to hear of a use case for them before anyone gets interested in implementation. People also seem to prefer to see the page as a link collection rather than a source of information, so the inclusion of other coordinate systems might not be appropriate, except perhaps at a section that has a service where they are used. Maybe the UTM coordinates should be moved elsewhere as well? Anyway, if the use case is just to see the coordinates in other systems, you could just find a converter or create one yourself, and then link to it from this template. --Para (talk) 22:34, 1 February 2008 (UTC)
I've implemented the Maidenhead converter as {{Coor Maidenhead}}. --  Denelson83  06:04, 7 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Geopage does not set the character set to UTF-8

In the last day, the character set is not defined to the browser by the script to be UTF-8, so the browser is using its own default which creates garbage on the screen if its not UTF-8. -- 76.30.255.191 (talk) 22:11, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

FYI, I think I'm having this problem, too. The degree symbols and some other ones (Unicode?) weren't showing right; I was able to fix the problem by resetting the encoding (in Firefox, View > Character Encoding > Auto-Detect > Universal). Jason McHuff (talk) 12:28, 22 December 2007 (UTC)
Should be fixed now. --Magnus Manske (talk) 11:30, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] type:village

Could you define a type:village having the same resolution as type:airport. Using the airport type seems to be ackward for a village. 79.180.24.164 (talk) 08:27, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Make it actually usefull

I don't know who magnus is and what his toys are doing on pages, but it would be nice if he would fix this so it actually inserts proper html, meaning something i can copy a paste and use elsewhere, instead of badly aligned floating stuff which overlaps other things and is hard to read a lot of the time. How about a link to a google earth KMZ file - that would be usefull.--IceHunter (talk) 09:06, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

What are you talking about? Cush (talk) 09:47, 23 December 2007 (UTC)
I believe this refers to the current Wikipedia practice of displaying coordinates at the top of articles with absolute CSS positioning relative to the top of the page, from MediaWiki:Monobook.css #coordinates, and the absence of direct map service links. It has nothing to do with Magnus, his toys, or GeoTemplate, but with Wikipedia and MediaWiki. The CSS does indeed make copying the coordinates harder, which is unfortunate, but I'm not aware of any way to display the coordinates better on the Wikipedia side using the current MediaWiki installation. If anyone has a solution in mind to use editor defined and wikitext filled elements outside the body of the page, Wikipedia:Village pump (technical) and Wikipedia:Bugzilla may help. IceHunter should also note that by clicking the coordinates you get a proper html page with all the links you could possibly want, including the Google Earth one. --Para (talk) 00:50, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] MSN Maps links and region codes

The URL used here for MSN Maps contains a parameter named regn1 which is assigned a numeric value. The link found on the GeoTemplate page under the Global systems heading uses regn1=2 for World Atlas maps (equivalent to L=WLD in a different format of the URL that can be seen by choosing a larger map size).

The following regions have more detailed maps which include roads, railroads, airports, lakes, rivers, etc. and can be viewed from altitudes of 1, 3, 6, 12, 25, 50, 150, 800, 2000, 7000, or 12000.

The following examples compare the map generated by the Global systems link to a map generated using the appropriate region code:

Currently, the following country section on GeoTemplate contain a local link for MSN Maps: United States (.com), Canada (.ca), Australia (.au), Brazil (.br), and in Europe: Austria (.at), France (.fr), Germany (.de), Great Britain (.uk), Italy (.it), Spain (.es). For other European countries, there was previously a link under the Europe heading, but it was removed in a revision on 23:14, 12 July 2007. Similarly, the North America section had a link that was removed in a revision on 10:16, 13 July 2007. To allow viewing the detailed MSN Maps for other areas, I see three possible solutions that only involve editing Template:GeoTemplate:

  1. Restore the removed links under North America and Europe and add a new one under Oceania. This works but the Europe and Oceania sections appear rather far down on the page.
  2. Insert links under each country heading. This would create a lot of extra links, but would work well with the feature that places the country-specific links at top of page.
  3. Update the current link under the Global systems heading to include links to detailed maps for each region.

I've implemented the third solution. -- Zyxw (talk) 12:58, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Stable toolserver

The wikimedia.de people have created a Stable Toolserver mainly so that edit counter and GeoHack don't go down with everything else. Kolossos and I have signed on as maintainers for GeoHack. My eventual goals are:

  • XHTML compliance
  • User interface improvements
  • Decoupling from Magnus's framework so it can run standalone
  • Interwiki language support
  • Better default scaling based on number of sigfigs
  • Possibly some graphical glints, like a the globe icon or background-image is the side where coordinate appears

If you have any suggestion feel free to post them here. —Dispenser (talk) 00:53, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Please use a subversion repository for the code and commit all changes there, instead of editing the files directly. More eyes to review changes and the code in general is a good thing. Other than that, I can only think of one more goal:
  • Work the code towards becoming a MediaWiki extension
Otherwise an improvement I've had in mind which doesn't affect the main code a lot but is big for users, would be a Javascript tool that allows people to move their preferred services higher or lower on the list and save the offset to a cookie for the next time. This would allow people to easily find the services they're used to, and on the side maybe give us some information on which services are used the most, and how interface changes affect that. The user interface could be just small up and down arrows at the right side of every line. Before that it would be good if we could move to one of the proposed GeoTemplate redesigns where each service has only one line and the cruft is dropped. --Para (talk) 01:46, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
Or instead of working toward making a new extension, work on merging this and the existing <geo> extension. -- SEWilco (talk) 17:29, 14 January 2008 (UTC)
Right. The current GeoHack consists of a forked part of Extension:Gis (source) slightly modified, which is the Geo, and the framework Magnus wrote to run that on the toolserver, including all the added functionality, the Hack. Some of Dispenser's goals would be for the hack part, as they are duplicating what MediaWiki would do if the code was being run as an extension, so it would be good to keep separate from the geo part everything that isn't directly related to coordinates or map sources. --Para (talk) 20:28, 14 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] GeoHack address name

At the current moment the tool's address resides at something like geohack/geohack.php. As the word 'hack' has general negative connotation and/or affiliation to hackers. So we are looking for a good name before the stable version goes "live". —Dispenser (talk) 00:53, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Names for to replace the Geohack name (atleast in the URL)

  • geo-provider
  • geo-splitter
  • geosources
  • geomaps
  • geolist
  • geo
  • mapssources
  • maps
  • maplist
I think the mapsources name from Egil's original extension is still fine. A http://stable.ts.wikimedia.org/mapsources/?params=… url would be pretty and doesn't need any magic. One without the last slash would be even prettier, but requires help from toolserver admins. --Para (talk) 01:30, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
It would be great if someone could drop me a line if the future URL is known (and before a changed GeoTemplate shows up on my watchlist :-) ) so that I can add it to the WikiMiniAtlas list of recognized URLs. --Dschwen 02:58, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
Pinpoint- I use geohack when I want to pinpoint a location. Other advantages Pinpoint is a redlink as is Pin Point in :en: wiki and :commons: ClemRutter (talk) 16:09, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
I think mapsources is properly descriptive. Pinpoint is nice as an action term, but what is presented is a list of map sources (I'm including geo images as being maps). -- SEWilco (talk) 16:42, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
The more I think, the more I like pinpoint. It always seems that open source programmer are always attempting to describe the functionality or history of the program with the name. Its 8 characters so there's no OS naming limitation and it doesn't conflict with any names. And for the sake of understanding current and historical the program will remain named GeoHack, but the service (i.e. copy running on stable) will be called pinpoint. I'll also try and figure out a nice format for the URLs. — Dispenser 02:45, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] openstreetmap.org

I've updated the link to OpenStreetMap to include a marker. In case the patch for OSM zoom levels is applied and I forget about this, somebody please modify this link to read 'zoom={osmzoom}'. Also, would people object to moving the OSM link to the Global systems section, perhaps near WikiMapia? Rvollmert (talk) 12:54, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Done (to both). Rvollmert (talk) 10:00, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Redesign

Many users have complained of the usability of this template, and that it contains too much distracting cruft. Since there were very few comments to the redesign section above, I decided to be bold and put up one of the proposed designs. It can later be changed to use icons for the service types if people are ok with it.

  • Pro: The placement of the link in the table shows the available map types in a service together with the label
  • Pro: Information about the services is displayed in an organised way
  • Pro: Users don't have to read a long description to know what to expect behind the link
  • Con: Service features that require something to be done in its user interface are not mentioned
  • Open: Services are not described - are there other details that should be mentioned of all services in an organised way, some detail that applies for all the contents of the service and won't change all the time?
  • Open: If we add icons on top of the labels later, would it make sense to have grayed out icons for services that can't be linked to directly, but have one of the common features?
  • Open: A good form needs to be found to link to the indirect services and indicate what they contain, without making it too similar with the direct links or too verbose to take all the attention
  • Open: I couldn't think of a decent way to include the odd MSN links Zyxw found

Comments? --Para (talk) 22:53, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm actually in favor of forking off the parts that are not very useful. The page is still big at 105 K (final rendering), and is still a problem for people with slow connection or those with ADHD that want their Google map now. I suggest that we enable the altpage= parameter and break the page into, markup, indirect, and a new page sorted by base server (ex. All Google maps mashups). On the indirect links we may want to consider just moving them to something like List of web mapping services as they do not provide what the user is looking for. Finally an idea that's been going through my head for a while is that we could transclude the contents of the this page else where (say /rendered) and have geohack use that page. This would allow us to use <noinclude> tags in the page. —Dispenser (talk) 06:00, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
I like the new design. Good work, it seems to reduce the space used.
As for the indirect links, we could put them in comments, this way, when editing, it's visible why they are not included. -- User:Docu
Can you rephrase "the contents of the this page else where"? -- SEWilco (talk) 16:38, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
I ment that /render would transclude Template:GeoTemplate. Which has the advantage that we could included <noinlcuded> tags on GeoTemplate and they would not show up on GeoHack. —Dispenser (talk) 17:16, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
So there's just an extra "the" rather than something being missing in the sentence. OK. -- SEWilco (talk) 19:01, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
I'm indifferent on these further changes, but I feel I should comment on this, so here goes. Ok, so the purpose of this template is to help people find good services to give further information in addition to the articles, everyone agrees on that. Even services without direct linking can have good data, though it's much harder to find from there. Then on the other hand, there's the usability wish on our side to keep the list compact. That's a visual requirement, as enabling compression again (it was disabled when Magnus separated his tool framework from GeoHack) would decrease the transfer by about 85%, so the byte size isn't a problem. The visual length of the page however may be, even when the most popular and most useful links are at the top, as based on the WP:GEO and WP:EL discussions some people can feel threatened by the long scrollbar and without even looking at the content think that the information they're after would be hard to find, or others who are attracted to the scrollbar and feel the need to glimpse through the entire page before starting to look for what they're after. I don't know if these people are in a minority or not. If people aren't all comfortable with the move from one mouse click to two, then a change to three clicks would probably be entirely unacceptable. If the page however is split up, it'd be important to set the rules on services that can be on the main list and which mashups are simple enough to be thrown somewhere else, and also remember that people shouldn't be made to fetch little sections from the server with just a couple of services. We could just use Javascript to show and hide some services if the screen space is really that essential. The idea of hiding less good services or other messages in HTML comments might not be too good, because people won't see that there is a service candidate which could be added if someone found out how to use it or contacted the authors, and also people usually edit sections from the closest edit link, so messages at the top of the general region section or at the top of the template don't do much good. Some noinclude web might work if the main template has good edit links to it.
Finally a wish: please someone save the html produced by GeoHack on your computer and edit it until the sections float side by side like this. That'd be quite a time saver with the abominable scrollbar. --Para (talk) 01:22, 23 January 2008 (UTC)
This version does it, somewhat. -- User:Docu
Well that was easy, thanks! I edited all the sections a bit so that the global and local sections look alike when they're side by side, which included moving the text before some service tables to after them. Is a vertical separator needed between them for those with less wide screens? --Para (talk) 22:44, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

In case one country-specific section is used, the remaining ones needn't be transcluded, or not? -- User:Docu

I've had the idea that when a location is near the border of two regions, services from other sections may be useful too, but I don't know if anyone would actually think of trying that. Maybe we could make GeoHack only return the global and local sections by default without markup sections and all, and then add a parameter to GeoHack to return all the sections only when requested, and add such a link to the GeoTemplate for those who would like markup or services from other regions? --Para (talk) 22:44, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
A call without a region code could list all sections. On the other hand, now that it was redesigned and the page is shorter, we might as well keep the other sections. -- User:Docu

[edit] Add ANTIPODES button

If you were smart you would add a button to bring the user to his antipodes. Jidanni (talk) 22:42, 20 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Empty local sections

Region Code Count
Netherlands NL 2500
Slovakia SK 2400
Hungary HU 2000
Philippines PH 1400
Greece GR 1000
Belgium BE 1000
Romania RO 900
Ireland IE 900
Colombia CO 800
Antarctica AQ 800
Argentina AR 800
Mexico MX 800
New Zealand NZ 700
Turkey TR 700
Ukraine UA 700
South Africa ZA 600
Bangladesh BD 600
Serbia CS 500
Pakistan PK 500

In a discussion at Wikipedia talk:External links#Links to map services there was a comment that "Global systems" is not obvious enough to inform the user that the listed services are expected to work with all locations in the world. Additionally the comment suggested that when a local section isn't found automatically, the user will try to look it up themselves. In most cases the cause for not having a local section at the top is that there is no local section for the region, and if they don't understand what "global" means, the user will end up frustrated. My initial fix for this was to move the table of contents below the "introduction" section with the most appropriate links, so that the toc won't be the first thing people see and try to interact with. What else could be done to help the users with this problem? The best solution would be to have GeoHack fill the local section with an appropriate message, but so far it doesn't have any internationalisation support other than the use of different GeoTemplates, so implementing that might be difficult and not in line with the idea of the system. Another solution could be to make sure that most regions have a local section, even if they are empty or filled with a message from the template. I did an automatic lookup of all the coordinates from Wikipedia-World, and the table on the right shows regions missing from the list. Should they be added as empty sections? It would still leave out regions with less coordinates than in the ones listed. --Para (talk) 20:50, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] coordinate needing fixing

I'm not familiar enough with the GeoTemplate's code to know where to put the needed change, but Tuber Hill is listed as a degree too far north; it should be 50-23, not 51-23. Oh, actually, it's 50-54, 123-44 as I just checked it on BC gov's LRDWC; changed it on Tuber Hill's wikipage, can't see through the maze of code here, unless it's somehow auto-generated which is why I can't find the figures to substitute. That map resource you guys want might to regularly list on this page; see http://www.maps.gov.bc.ca - "Land and Data Resources Warehouse Catalogue" or by direct link here. Skookum1 (talk) 16:17, 12 February 2008 (UTC)

Why don't you just edit the placemark yourself?? This has nothing to do with the GeoTemplate but with the entered coordinates, right? {{coor d|50.543129|N|-123.393839|W|type:mountain_region:CA}} = 50.543129° N -123.393839° W Cush (talk) 10:09, 13 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Deletion attempt

Someone tried to delete this template because it is not in use. Perhaps there should be a noinclude header which mentions how this template is used. -- SEWilco (talk) 05:59, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Noinclude only works with MediaWiki transclusion, which is available only if it's done on Wikipedia. This template page however is read directly by GeoHack, which sees exactly the same that all editors of the page see. There was some discussion above on maybe splitting the template in parts and then transcluding all of them on a page for GeoHack to download, so that noinclude bits could be used for all sorts of messages to editors, but maybe such a structure would be too complicated. Anyway, the page is used like a template but it doesn't work like MediaWiki templates normally do, so maybe it shouldn't be in the Template namespace, and should be moved alongside with Wikipedia:Book sources? --Para (talk) 12:24, 15 February 2008 (UTC)
Yes. Wikipedia:Map sources maybe? That already redirects here. -- SEWilco (talk) 16:33, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Simple question

As I work on my UKgrid to WGS84 tool, I am visiting a lot of pages, and finding that the Coords are inaccurate. It could be a quick clean up job if I knew how to do it. Can someone link me to a policy that says where/what/how we should pinpoint as the coords of a village. Look at the test coordinate above for London- the point used is the corner of Nelsons Column in Trafalgar Square. 51.51929839;-0.12399326 This is in Charing Cross, not London, or even Westminster. This is about 2.5km away from Mansion House, 51.5125|-0.0938 or 3 from Monument. Then the religiously inclined may define London by it cathedral 51.5136|-0.1005, and the historians by the tower 51.5080|-0.0761 (additional thought- the main gate or the centre of the keep?). As we are working to 7m accuracy now, I think this is an issue that needs to be addressed- could someone tell me where the discussion is taking place? ClemRutter (talk) 15:59, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

You should be posting this over at WP:WikiProject Geographical coordinates. — Dispenser 18:28, 24 February 2008 (UTC)
Thanks. I have. Discussion seems limited to why some coords may be wrong- and the best definition I have been given is- pinpoint the centre of the earliest known settlement- so in the case of London, the coordinate above is wrong- we should have pinpointed the centre of the Roman Forum in Londinium. (Corner of Lombard Street/Gracechurch Street)51.5119;-0.0852. Hail Caesar! ClemRutter (talk) 20:24, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Map of all coordinates in the article

Pardon, but I no longer find the "Map of all coordinates in the article" link. Where is/should be it? --151.50.22.112 (talk) 17:46, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

I moved it to the top next to the article title (labeled as All coordinates) as it looked out of place floating squized to the size of the tables. — Dispenser 18:28, 24 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] New Mapping Service: PlanetEye.com

PlanetEye.com, a new mapping service with photos and other interesting data points has become available. It is capable of selecting the top ranked photos on any given area of the world map, without cluttering the display if the number of photos available is too large. Because of its nature I think it should go under the section of sites with wiki elements. Below is the suggested code to be used:

*[http://www.planeteye.com/Map.aspx#lat={latdegdec}&lng={londegdec}&z={osmzoom}&mediaLens=media Find photos in this location] on PlanetEye [http://www.planeteye.com/].

Let me know if you have any questions about the service. Jugonzal (talk) 18:00, 28 February 2008 (UTC)

Why did you not drop it in? Heptazane (talk) 17:47, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
Oops. I hesitated because it says that the page is semi-protected, but I just made the changes and seem to work fine. Thanks. Jugonzal (talk) 20:34, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] MapQuest Appears to be Broken

I tried it on a couple of pages, and it never comes up with the map. I'm guessing they changed their URL parameters, but not going to investigate. Heptazane (talk) 17:45, 7 March 2008 (UTC)

Still works with another hostname. Fixed. --Para (talk) 23:36, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Recommend removing Topozone.com

Trails.com purchased Topozone.com, and Topozone.com is now subscription-only. We'll need another site that offers free Topographic maps. Bms4880 (talk) 20:14, 10 April 2008 (UTC)

TerraServer-USA provides USGS satellite imagery and topographic maps. This template previously only contained a link for the satellite imagery, but I updated it to include a link to the topographic maps. The terraserver-usa.com maps are also available via Acme Mapper, which also has a "topo" link on this template. -- Zyxw (talk) 17:58, 27 April 2008 (UTC)
The Topozone link still displays a map, but zooming in or out changes the URL to trails.com and adds a large watermark (consisting of the text "Remove This Watermark. Subscribe Today!" and the Trails.com logo). Additionally, only the small size (420 x 300 pixel) maps are available to non-subscribers. I just renamed the U.S. and Canada links from "Topozone" to "Trails.com" (the URLs remain unchanged at this time). However, the Canada link should probably be deleted, since it only has maps for a small area of Canada north of the U.S. border which is displayed on the USGS topographic maps. -- Zyxw (talk) 19:05, 27 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Live Search Maps

It would appear, at least for users with UK IP addresses, this now redirects to Multimap, without the Point being passed through. In return, Multimap now has aerial photography and oblique views world wide. -- Ratarsed (talk) 18:21, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

Seems they've turned the redirect off, so Live Search Maps work again... -- Ratarsed (talk) 19:26, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] South Eastern Hokkaido inaccuracy with Geographical Survey Institute

Hi there. The GeoHack seems to have trouble with coordinates when looking at the south eastern corner of Hokkaido Japan and using the link to the Geographical Survey Institute. For an example see Mount Apoi or Mount Tengu (Samani). Clicking on the Topo link for Mount Apoi puts you at 43°2'5"N 143°13'3"E instead of 42°6′28″N 143°1′32″E. A discrepancy of 4 minutes north and 12 minutes eastwards.

Can someone help? imars (talk) 15:31, 17 April 2008 (UTC)

42°6′28″N 143°1′32″E / 42.10778, 143.02556 is converted to b=42628&l=143132 for the Geographical Survey Institute link. As you found, that site requires a zero before single-digit minutes: b=420628&l=1430132. Placing leading zeros in the {{coord}} template (42°06′28″N 143°01′32″E / 42.10778, 143.02556) does not help since GeoHack trims the leading zeros from the {latminint} parameter. I'm not aware of a way to include the required leading zeros. Perhaps someone who reads Japanese can check whether the Geographical Survey Institute will accept decimal degrees (42.10778, 143.02556). -- Zyxw (talk) 05:08, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Sera Monastery inaccurate coordinates

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I'll try it.

The article on the Sera Monastery states that it's at 35° 56′ 53″ N, 91° 8′ 0″ E, clearly not in Tibet. According to detailed aerial images, the correct coordinates are 29° 41' 53" N, 91° 8' 0" E. Could somebody please fix this error? I don't really feel like registering just to change it. Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 204.112.172.250 (talk) 22:08, 20 April 2008 (UTC)

The place to post this would have been Talk:Sera Monastery, since it only required an edit to the article. However, the coordinates you supplied are located within Sera Monastery so I have corrected them in the article. -- Zyxw (talk) 04:09, 28 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] {title} in Google links

I was thinking of adding {title} to the Google Maps links (see [12] for an example). Is there any reason not to do so? --- RockMFR 20:01, 12 May 2008 (UTC)

Nvm. I see that it breaks on articles with parentheses. --- RockMFR 21:29, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Aerial vs Satellite

Shouldn't the distinction be drawn between Aerial and Satellite images? --Voidvector (talk) 19:26, 14 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Title vs Pagename

If in a link a title is given (via name parameter) {{coor title d|33.968915|N|51.404738|E|name=Sialk}} then no pagename parameter should be rendered into the resulting url. http://toolserver.org/~magnus/geo/geohack.php?pagename=Tappeh_Sialk&params=33.968915_N_51.404738_E_{{{5}}}. Especially not with ugly underscores. Cush (talk) 04:39, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

{{coor title d}} doesn't allow the name to be specified yet, as the coordinates are meant to be for the topic of the article. The article "Tappeh_Sialk" should probably be renamed as it starts with "Sialk is a large ancient archeological site ..". If in several coordinates are given in the articles, it can be specified what they are about (use {{coor d}} for each. -- User:Docu