Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Roads/Maps task force

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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Wikipedia:WikiProject U.S. Roads/Maps task force page.
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The maps task force asks that all map requests be left on the requests page and not on this page. Your cooperation is appreciated.

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[edit] Main image inconsistency

I am commenting on a current WP:FAC for New York State Route 28 and I have run into a maps issue. Standards are wide ranging for a coordinated project like this. I think one of the first three should be the main image standard for Road images. Here it is in pictures:
Notice varying standards of local detail maps. Kansas has shielding and a legend. I-355 has complete shielding including one for the article. NY-174 has all but the shiled for the article's route. Pulaski and I-70 in Utah look like they needs work comparatively. You can see why I object to NY 28 being an FA because a close look shows routes that may be confused with rivers. Chickasaw is partially shielded, which is annoying. N.B.: Featured article Prairie Avenue could use a map.


I don't think a bare map merits sending an article to FAR - a quick glance shows the only things odd about that article in the 2–4 years that it's been an FA is the fact that galleries (and other gallery-like structures) are discouraged in articles now. The only thing that needs to be done IMO is that some Interstate Highway shields need to be attached to the proper highways. —Rob (talk) 16:03, 28 April 2008 (UTC)
Well, the scale isn't really something we can standardize, seeing as how some very short highways would only appear as a tiny red dot on the map. A localized view needs some context, so either an inset map showing the area of detail (which should be used more often than they are, IMO) or shields need to be added to the map. Whenever possible, I believe a whole-state view (preferably with county lines) should be utilized, because that gives the greatest amount of context possible.
As to the Kansas Turnpike map, that map was made before MTF existed, I think, and I merely changed the colors afterward to match the MTF standards. So it's really sort of "grandfathered-in" so to speak. —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 18:19, 28 April 2008 (UTC)
I am not commenting on scale. I am saying they should be consistently shielded and there should be consistency with legends. Insetting would probably help as well, but htat is not a big issue with me right now. I think shielding consistently is issue one and deciding whether to use a legend is issue two. You guys should set policy within your task force and make sure all FAs represent your finest work with respect to your own poicies and standards. Maps without shields are clearly not your finest work.
You are probably right it would be a bit extreme to GAR an article to get the attention of the maps team, but I think your FAs should be your highest priority and both Pulaski Skyway and Prairie Avenue need your help. In addition you have a current WP:FAC that has a substandard map at New York State Route 28.
I know a lot of the maps were specifically requested without shields. My personal preference has always been to include them for other major routes that appear on the map. A problem the task force currently has is our two biggest contributors are currently not active, one retired and the other is on vacation. As a result, there is a backlog on the requests page. --Holderca1 talk 20:33, 28 April 2008 (UTC)
IMO, the default should have major intersections shielded. Also, the default for WP:FAC going forward should be to include a main image with a shielded map, IMO.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 18:55, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
That's impractical (due to the difficulty in sufficiently bribing QGIS into putting the shields where you want them) and unnecessary for most articles; doesn't the map on Oklahoma State Highway 74 do the job needed just as well without shields? —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 21:03, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
Oh, and NY-28's map meets all MTF standards as far as I can see. —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 21:05, 29 April 2008 (UTC)
Is there any reason why we can't import the map as a png to Inkscape and put the shields on there? - or as all pngs in Photohop or GIMP? That's what I did for I-894, and WIS 29  — master sonT - C 23:18, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

While I personally would never go so far to "oppose" a FAC based on the quality of a map – although I rarely if ever participate in FAC discussions anyway – I really think it's essential to have some sort of minimal labeling on a map so that we can tell what the heck it's a map of. A map doesn't really add anything to the article if it can't tell the reader where the route is. -- Kéiryn talk 23:41, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

That's essentially what I was saying above about scale and context. If you have significant portions of the state outline visible in the map, it's easy to see where the route is. (I mean, look at the map on Oklahoma State Highway 325, does that really need shields? You can tell what part of Oklahoma that is.) Whereas, on more zoomed in maps, it's not readily apparent what you're looking at, so more clues to context are needed. Shields do the trick, but so do insets (like on Oklahoma State Highway 110), and it should really be left to the cartographer to determine when adding extra context is appropriate and when it's not. —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 04:40, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
The only problem with that reasoning is that the map isn't just used to determine where the route is, it is also used to determine where it is in relation to other routes. --Holderca1 talk 12:27, 30 April 2008 (UTC)
Sure, but that doesn't mean you have to necessarily know what the other routes are. Having them there for context helps you gauge relative positions, but plastering the map with shields makes extra work for the cartographers (which it's already a huge pain in the ass to make maps already, why make it worse) and detracts from the quality of the map by adding too many things cluttering it. Shields should only be added when absolutely necessary to show where a highway is. I note that The Weather Channel's local forecast radar maps show roads but more often than not leave them unlabeled (though some do have shields; I'm not sure why they feel US 71 needs a shield and I-44 doesn't, though) and trust the viewer to recognize the road based on its path and use it as context to judge the area that's getting weather. —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 00:43, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

I know that User:25or6to4 can pretty much put a shield anywhere you want it, he uses the shields we have created here for them so not sure how he adds them to the maps. --Holderca1 talk 23:45, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Ok, I'm not a cartographer, nor do I claim to be one. I don't know what all this fuss is over though. I think someone is advocating for perfect consistency in an inconsistent world. Not all maps will ever be created equally. It's just not possible. To oppose an FAC over something as simple as a map, which is arguably a minor portion of the total article, even if a picture is supposed to say a thousand words, well that strikes me as petty. I have to wonder if certain editors are taking issue over a lack of resources at the task force at getting maps created are now using USRD's recent string of FACs as a a soapbox to protest unrelated issues at MTF. Not everyone on WP will be gifted in the knowledge, the software or the artistry to make a good map. The same can be said for copyediting prose in an article. Our talents vary and instead of griping over the backlog at MTF, we should be happy to have MTF to make the many maps we as a project need. Yes, it would be great if all the maps could look the same, but they won't. Some can't. Just as my writing style differs from others' styles on here, one cartographer's style will vary from another's. Oh, and each will make individual editorial decisions over what to include in the maps they make. Imzadi1979 (talk) 00:58, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

I would not describe this as a soapbox. I have a really good article that needs a map. In fact, I have an FA and a few GAs that need maps and I am getting no responses. Thus, I am saying that we should get the maps right before promoting articles if we can't get anyone to work on even the best articles. You would think an FA in need of a map would be the highest priority for the project. Then GAs would also be pretty high priorities. It may be wrong for me to oppose for maps in general. NY 28 really looked like a bunch of rivers to me. Chickasaw is not as confusing so I can not justify opposing just for the map although the map is incomplete.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 03:27, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
Nobody likes making maps. As I said before, it's a pain in the ass. That's why nobody's making the requested maps. And as has been said above, the two people who were willing to make the maps for states that they aren't familiar with are on vacation. Also, nobody else really seems to agree that lacking shields makes the maps 'wrong', as you assert. I certainly feel that maps without shields do the job quite well in showing you what region of the state that the road lies in. Also, the "bunch of rivers" are freeways marked exactly the same on all the maps we have; even the shade of blue is more or less standardized. To address any possible confusion, I added a legend template to the map that confused you, so now you can just click the map and it tells you what the lines mean. I think your objections are really off-base here. —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 05:39, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
I don't see a legend template. Also, did you say nobody is available to do Illinois maps at this time?--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 04:00, 3 May 2008 (UTC)
I believe at this time there's no one available to make any maps. A few other users have made a few here and there, but the two main editors at the task force aren't available right now, IIRC. Imzadi1979 (talk) 04:39, 3 May 2008 (UTC)
The legend's on the image description page. If you can't see it, there's something messed up on your end. —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 04:50, 3 May 2008 (UTC)
Is the WP:USRD/MTF convention to put legends on description pages? Also, there is nothing in New York State that anyone calls a turnpike, althought I think you are describing the New York State Thruway as a turnpike because it is a toll road. There are two other legend items not used in the particular map. The average reader is not going to know to click on the map for a legend. It is not up to me to set the task force standard however. If you feel description page legends are useful so be it.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 00:49, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
I agree with Scott 100% on this; I think a mountain range is being made out of a molehill here. FWIW, I really don't see any difference between the maps for NY 174 and Chickasaw Turnpike - contrary to what is posted in that box up above, not every route is marked on the map for NY 174 nor should it be. I find no issues, really, with any of the maps posted in the box - different zoom levels are going to result in different levels of detail, and attempting to mark every route, especially on statewide (or greater scale) maps, is going to clutter the map. The only map where a valid case may be made is the Pulaski Skyway map, which is probably local enough to get at least a couple shields for context purposes.
The Chickasaw map is decent, but it could use a shield on the green road and the other major highways on the outer portions of the image, IMO.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 04:05, 3 May 2008 (UTC)
Why? —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 04:50, 3 May 2008 (UTC)
Shields convey information. This is an encyclopedia. The intent of an encyclopedia is to inform.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 00:49, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
WP:NOT a indiscriminate collection of information. Each map is tailored to the article it appears in. Say we have a map for SH-39. The shields for other routes that appear on the map, like SH-59 and US-77 aren't only tangentially relevant to SH-39 — the meager improvement (if it is conceded that such an improvement exists at all) that including the shields provides is outweighed by the extra work that must be invested in the map to add the shields. Adding the shields isn't worth it, and can even be considered as indiscriminate information. Why doesn't the map on Platte National Park have the counties labeled, or highways included? Because that information is not relevant to the purpose of the map, which is to show the location of the point of interest. Similarly, the purpose of our including these maps is to show the location of the road, our point of interest, and adding other highways' shields on the map does not help except in the circumstance that the map must be so zoomed in that the inclusion of shields is the only way give context to allow the viewer to determine where a road is. If the viewer wants to see a general view of the entire region, the many state Departments of Transportation provide excellent maps for free, in both paper and PDF form. —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 01:48, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
Speaking purely as a cartographer, making maps is indeed a pain in the ass. It takes, in many cases, an hour of work to produce a map - and that's if I work non-stop. And that hour includes the QGIS end of it only, so that's not even considering urban area labeling, water body labeling, shields, etc., which has to be done in Paint Shop Pro after the effect. So when all is said and done, a map typically takes 2-3 hours to make - a time frame where I would much rather be doing something else. – TMF 07:01, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Besides, if you put shields on every road that has a shield, you end of with something like this map for Atascosa County, Texas which was made to show all the highways in that county and not to show one particular route. --Holderca1 talk 13:09, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

That is a bit more details than I am asking for. I am saying that the three at the top are sufficient detail and the five at the bottom need more shielding, IMO.--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 04:05, 3 May 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for that. Yeah, that's pretty much what I was saying about clutter. —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 14:39, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Urban area light yellow

Many maps show urban areas in a light yellow color. Shall we make this part of the standard? What exact values of yellow? —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 23:28, 1 May 2008 (UTC)

I've always used a background of 255,255,230 and given the area a 0.5x solid border colored 110,110,110 (the 0.5x border was achieved by experimenting with some values in QGIS' print exporter). My inspiration for it was either some maps by Strato or 25or6to4, which used those/similar specs. I say it should be part of the standard, since virtually every map produced by the two (good thing BTW) and several of mine have these areas. – TMF 06:39, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
Oh, and out of curiosity, where are those layers coming from? I went to the ESRI TIGER download site, but the only zip files it'll give me have 77 zips inside, each with a set of shapeline files. Can I get one that has all urban areas in a state? —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 17:03, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
There's a nationwide shapefile on the Census Bureau site [1] but they don't have ones by state. The ones on the ESRI site appear to be separated by county. --Polaron | Talk 17:36, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
Supposedly, this is from 2006. Strato|sphere 05:05, 15 May 2008 (UTC)
I have just recently started using the updated TIGER shapefiles here for 2007, which are separated by state. Select your state, then download the "Current Place". I have used the lightest yellow option in arcGIS (255,255,190). 25or6to4 (talk) 05:17, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Map projections

On a couple of the maps I posted on the requests page, I noticed that there were comments that there were problems with the projection (the maps were of New York state and were stretched horizontally. What is the correct projection to use, and how do I change the projection in QGIS 0.8.1? Thanks. - Algorerhythms (talk) 01:05, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

I use Lambert Conformal Conic when I make maps for New York. To change the projection, go to "Settings - Project Properties" and click the "Projection" tab. First, click the "Enable on the fly projection" toggle box to place an "X" in the box. Then move down to the large box containing several projections. By default, WGS 84 is the project projection - one that results in horizontal stretching. The Lambert Conformal Conics are in the "Projected Coordinate Systems" category; after clicking the Lambert Conformal Conic category below it, click the NAD 83 projection that best matches the map location and click OK (for the NY conic, simply click the "QGIS SRSID" radio button in the search and type in 1936). The project should then re-render and zoom very far into the map, at which point it will be necessary to zoom to extents and rework the zoom level from there.
All of this makes me wonder why we don't have something like a tutorial page that would have the information above plus other helpful hints. – TMF 06:50, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
Thanks for the info. A tutorial page would be very useful, seeing as the QGIS developers seem to have made some strange design decisions for their program. - Algorerhythms (talk) 15:20, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
Yeah, especially in every version after 0.8.1 (I personally consider 0.8.1 to be the best version available - every one since is really lacking).
I'll draw up a draft tutorial page sometime this weekend, since I believe it'd be beneficial to both experienced cartographers and ones looking to traverse the learning curve (which can be steep with maps, no doubt). – TMF 22:16, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Hopefully helpful QGIS feature

I noticed TMF mentioned above that labeling of water features, cities, etc. took a long time. Well, hopefully this feature I found will help all of us QGIS users out: if you go to the Layer Properties dialog, there's a Labels tab. This tab lets you select one data field to be displayed as a label near the feature on the map. Sometimes it picks odd places to put the labels, but it seems to have some sort of collision detection that will automatically move conflicting labels around. Hope this is useful — I've found it works best for displaying county names. —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 22:58, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

I've been using it lately for county labels, and it works very well. It doesn't work well for city labels, though, as the urbanized area layer sometimes splits larger cities into more than one polygon, and each polygon is given a label, resulting in the same city name being displayed many times. That's an issue with the GIS data and not the program, though. - Algorerhythms (talk) 23:44, 4 May 2008 (UTC)
That actually depends on the program. Usually polygons with the same feature name are actually a single poly made up of multiple parts. In GIS this is a multipart feature. ArcGIS can limit a multipart feature to label one part of the polygon (usually the largest part), or you can select to label every feature. I'm not sure how QGIS deals with this. Strato|sphere 05:02, 15 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] High resolution state road maps

I don't understand the dilemma in creating maps for every major road. Why not just create a high resolution pre-labeled state maps of all major roads? It would be consistent and all the major roads can be easily cropped for their individual articles. 69.196.145.14 (talk) 14:46, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Well, because that would be an incredible pain in the ass. Not only would you have to make a huge map, and spend weeks labeling it, you're liable to cause your computer (or at least the GIS program) to crash from the sheer amount of memory and processor power required to render it (good luck getting though that without a segmentation fault), and then you'd need oodles and oodles of memory to load it into GIMP or Inkscape or whatever to apply the labels and crop. A file of sufficient resolution is likely to be several dozen megabytes in size. Sorry, not feasible.
If you want a labeled map of all highways in the state, contact your state Department of Transportation and request one. They also often have PDFs available on their website. —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 16:29, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Infobox Road captions

Is there a way to either caption the marker or the map in {{infobox road}}?--TonyTheTiger (t/c/bio/WP:CHICAGO/WP:LOTM) 22:21, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

Why would you need to do such a thing? --Rschen7754 (T C) 22:23, 11 May 2008 (UTC)

This page is part of WikiProject U.S. Roads. Rush Street is not under our scope; it's part of U.S. Streets. This project does not concern itself with local streets. —Scott5114↗ [EXACT CHANGE ONLY] 23:23, 11 May 2008 (UTC)