Category talk:Towns in Queensland

message: Would Mining towns of Queensland be an appropriate sub-category?--ZayZayEM 14:22, 31 Oct 2004 (UTC)

message: Hi! I’ve been doing a lot of copy editing on articles of inland towns in Queensland, and noticed that a lot of them are laden with geographical coordinates for places.  Places such as schools, libraries, etc in small towns.  Is this really necessary or is it just clogging up the article?  I’d say the latter.
For example, in Dysart, Queensland#Education we have:
"Dysart State School is a government primary (Prep-6) school for boys and girls at Garnham Drive (22.5877°S 148.3475°E)." 
So it’s necessary to have geographical coordinates in case…..what? Schools aren’t hard to find, whether looking for them on the ground or on a map.  To me this is overkill and to be honest, looks a bit ridiculous.  
Anyone in agreement for me to delete them?  Thanks. Boscaswell talk 22:29, 12 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: As a person who adds coordinates, I would obviously disagree. Firstly, there's nothing against it in policy as the coords are accurate and cited. All of us contribute to Wikipedia according to our interests, mine being geography and history. Both of these need coords. Towns are a geographic topic so a map is useful. Adding the coords of landmarks and other points of interest in a town allows the automatic creation of the map with the GeoGroup template, as is the case with the Dysart article. The other reason is to preserve such information for history. You say it is easy to find a school. Yes, for the schools which are currently in existence, but it is not easy to find the location of a closed school or a school that has had a name change. And even in the time Wikipedia has existed, schools in Queensland have closed/renamed and their locations have become difficult to find. The reason it is not easy to find the location of historic things is because nobody wrote down the address/coords of current places in a document that has survived to be accessible today, because it was "common knowledge" then but isn't common knowledge now. For anyone interested in history, one of the frustrations is reading old documents referring to places names and institutions etc which no longer exist and nobody knows where they were, effectively creating black holes in our history. One of the things I do outside of Wikipedia is try to track down "lost" and "renamed" places. Because Wikipedia is CC-BY licenced (and widely copied by many people and organisations), it means that no matter what the fate of Wikipedia itself, the information it contains is likely to survive in some form. So I add addresses and coords to ensure that what is "common knowledge" or "easy to find" NOW remains so in the future, in try to future-proof the history of our times. Street addresses alone are insufficient as street numbers, street names, suburb/town names all can change over time, and of course natural features like mountains etc don't have street address, so coords are the most reliable form of geo-locating places for historical purposes (albeit with some small techtonic plate movement). Wikipedia isn't just an encyclopedia for today; it's a resource for the future too. Kerry (talk) 03:35, 13 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Geographical coordinates for places