Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Archive 5

message: Hi, I am in the process of adding a map showing the location of every town in a subcategory of :Category:Towns_in_England (and intend to then move on to Scottish/Welsh towns). I've had trouble finding the coordinates of some towns. Please could you take a look at User:Lupin/coords and help me to fill in the blanks? Many thanks. Lupin 14:48, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Help needed to find latitude/longitude of some UK towns 

message: Whilst people navigating the coast of Great Britain may use latitude and longitude, inland these co-ordinates are almost never used because we have the excellent British national grid reference system. index.php should be amended to accept grid references as an alternative input parameter. Or a separate php should be written. It needs to accept both the all-numeric and the 'two letters plus even number of digits' formats.
If this was done, the following articles and hundreds more could use the php instantly. special:whatlinkshere/Template:Gbmapping, special:whatlinkshere/Template:Gbmappingsmall, special:whatlinkshere/Template:Gbmaprim.
And so they don't feel left out, you would also need to accept Irish grid refs.
-- RHaworth 01:20, 2005 Apr 27 (UTC)
:Input in UTM was implemented once, but I later sort of decided against it because it made parsing of Wikitext to extract coordinates more complex and ugly since every parser would have to include routines for detecting and converting transverse mercator. So I removed and, and for the existing cases were UTM was used, I converted to lat/lon. 
:OSGB36 adds the extra subtility that it is not referrenced to WGS84, which makes yet another exception. So my thought was that it was much cleaner to have input as pure WGS84 lat/lon, and convert to other systems as required for the various map sources. One other thing: wouldn't you need to convert to degrees WGS84 for use with a GPS navigator, anyway? -- Egil 05:38, 28 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  OSGB36 as input 

message: I can see this map location is evolving, and has to deal with interfacing with many different kinds of geo-databases.
I added the following to the kiwi page kakahi.
* Kakahi Location on a map: 
The worldwind URL on this page is not supported... eg
Composite Satellite/Radar Image of Kakahi with Mountains: Ruahehu, Tongarero and Ngarahoe in background  Hence I will have no reason or temptation to upload the (derived) equvalent WorldWind screen shot.
OK... it would be "nice to have" the information for alt, dir and tilt in wiki.  As a "coor" it would be available to other applications also, rather then just worldwind.
Also the current "coor" stub  allows a contributor to add the country and administrative unit, but the TownName/Topic name is missing.  Hence the name of the "coor" will be derived from the page name.  Hence only one coor per page is useful.
And if I was to get really excited, then maybe it would be useful to add Date/time so information about photos can be tagged with location and time photo was taken.  This would be useful for automatic generation of timelines for a location or country.
NevilleDNZ 08:14, 12 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Worldwind alt, dir, tilt parameters +++ 

message: Hi, I transfer 2600 coordinates from the german Wikipedia in a XML-file for the software Google Earth . At this website you can see the results and download the pointdata. I test also NASA World Wind, but this software can handle max. 200 points. With more points it stop the work. I hope with my work we can better handle the coordinates in the german Wikipedia. The user can see how bad or good the point is. I use the types to groupe the points. It was usefull to create a new type:waterbodies for lakes, channels and waterfalls. -- Stefan Kühn 2 July 2005 00:14 (UTC)
: Now I have complete the dataset with 5300 Points from the englisch Wikipedia. Download. In Google Earth load this klm-file with Menu File/Open. -- Stefan Kühn 16:59, 16 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Google Earth with 2600 coordinates from german Wikipedia