Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates

message: There are over 20,000 articles missing coordinates that have coordinates on Wikidata. 
While I don't intend to import coordinates from Wikidata, as I don't believe it is well-curated at the moment, this is suggestive that a substantial number of articles will have coordinates on non-English Wikipedias, many of which have a sufficiently large user-base that they can be considered to be effectively curated by human beings. 
I propose that we start importing coordinates from the following Wikipedias, all of which have more than 1 million articles, and have not had articles mass-created by LSJbot:
* German 2,828,000+ articles 
* French 2,546,000+ articles 
* Russian 1,933,000+ articles  
* Spanish 1,886,000+ articles 
* Italian 1,823,000+ articles 
* Japanese: 1,384,000+ articles 
* Chinese 1,373,000+ articles
* Portuguese 1,107,000+ articles
As part of this exercise. I plan first to generate lists of candidate coordinates from these  that they can be assessed for quality before going any further. 
Yes, I know that in theory, Wikidata is the way to do this kind of cross-wiki syncing. But in practice, there's as yet no real cross-wiki integration to enable human curation, and thus Wikidata is not ready to be useful as a way to do this yet. And of course, if I do the interwiki copying, I intend to export any coordinates I find to Wikidata as part of the process, if they're not already present, so that as and when Wikidata is eventually usable for this purpose, we can easily migrate to using Wikidata as the master data source.
I'd welcome any comments other editors have on this. In particular, please let me know now if you have any objections to this plan; I don't want to waste my time implementing this only to for the addition of these coordinates to be rejected by the community. — The Anome (talk) 17:25, 1 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd be interested to hear your comments on this. — The Anome (talk) 09:35, 2 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Though I think your concerns about Wikidata are unfounded, I support this import. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:12, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

text: I've been thinking about this since I saw that you had posted it. Unlike Pigsonthewing, I share your doubt of Wikidata, and I've certainly run across incorrect coordinates in other-language WPs as well. I imagine that a great number of geocoded articles in other languages are already geocoded here, so I'm not sure how many sets of new coordinates you're going to come up with; but I'm willing to hold my judgment. (When I'm looking for coordinates to add to one of our articles, one of the things I usually do is check to see if they're present in a corresponding article in the relevant-language WP, and I can't say that I often find any that way.) Your plan "to generate lists of candidate coordinates from these [so] that they can be assessed for quality" seems a good first step, and I'd like to see how that turns out. Will you post the results somewhere so that others can inspect them? Deor (talk) 18:34, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

text: I fairly often correct bad coords in WD; some of our large imports are indeed dirty. Probably coords that are mass-imported from any Wikipedia will be no dirtier than the average import; might even be cleaner. I'm comfortable with the notion that a load of coords with median errors of 10 or 50 meters are better than nothing. As it happens, a few minutes ago I corrected an error of 50 meters in my own coords for an urban photo, so no use my complaining about other moderately dirty suppliers. You might want to get into touch with whoever thinks they handle coords in WikiData; they might have something important to say, like, nevermind importing WPDE or other WP language coords into WPEN; just put it in WD and use a template to show it in English. Jim.henderson (talk) 01:14, 5 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  RFC: importing coordinates from other language editions 

message: Hello. There is a discussion that might be of your interest and it would be great if you can provide your feedback at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Maps#Feedback requested for innovation made. Sincerely, Thinker78 (talk) 01:14, 16 March 2024 (UTC)
thread_title: Feedback requested for innovation made

message: I have captured my experience about improving geodata accuracy on OSM and Wikidata and shared it through a short OSM user diary and also a long form article on OSM wiki. Let me know your feedback or your questions. Arjunaraoc (talk) 11:04, 10 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Improving geodata accuracy on OSM and Wikidata 

message: I see that the Overture Maps Foundation (https://overturemaps.org/) have created a new identifier, the Global Entity Reference System. GERS identifiers are opaque 128-bit handles intended to identify unique entities at any level within the hierarchy of a geographic data system, but don't seem to be UUIDs. (See https://docs.overturemaps.org/guides/gers/). There seems to be some structure within them to be used to ease allocation (and perhaps as a sanity check), but that structure is not supposed to be used as data by end users. (See https://github.com/OvertureMaps/schema/discussions/27)
They also define more structured metadata types, such as places: https://docs.overturemaps.org/schema/reference/places/place/
We should probably follow this iniatiative and work out whether we should link our data with theirs. — The Anome (talk) 10:17, 17 April 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Global Entity Reference System 

message: I suggest a new coord family tag, . This would indicate that the article describes somewhere with known coordinates, but that those coordinates are restricted from public view with good reasons, and Wikipedians should not attempt to add coordinates to those articles. The primary use would be for archeological sites, whose locations are restricted to thwart vandals and grave robbers. — The Anome (talk) 09:46, 4 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: Is that consistent with the purpose of Wikipedia?. Wikipedia is not censored: we are here to supply information. One productive way (that came from the discussion at Talk:Hyperion (tree)) is to supply approximate coordinates, and highlight the fact that the coordinates are approximate. Barring coordinates entirely from an article seems excessive. — hike395 (talk) 18:56, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

text: An approximation (e.g., d° m') followed by a hidden comment would suffice. If an editor disregards the hidden comment, they would likely disregard this proposed tag. ―Mandruss ☎ 19:06, 4 May 2024 (UTC)

text: Re U.S. locations: I've seen cases in which an NRHP-listed house's location was restricted at the owner's request but our article gave the house's street address, and I've also seen ones in which a historic district's location was restricted but the NHRP nomination form gave the district's exact boundaries. Figuring that the cat was out of the bag, so to speak, in those cases, I went ahead and added coordinates. I've also seen cases in which the NHRP restricts an archaeological site's location and I declined to add coordinates, even though I knew where the place is. Re archaeological sites elsewhere: If the site is labeled on Google Maps or OpenStreetMap, I think it would be overscrupulous to avoid giving coordinates in our article. I think your suggested tag might be a good idea, especially to replace  tags in articles about places whose "coordinates are restricted from public view with good reasons", but I fear that it might be applied indiscriminately. I also think that approximate coordinates could be useful in some cases, as hike395 and Mandruss have suggested. Deor (talk) 22:08, 4 May 2024 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with  that Wikipedia is WP:NOTCENSORED, but we do not, for example, routinely publish people's home addresses, because there are sensible reasons not to do so. Approximate locations may be the right way to go in some circumstances; I did this recently for an archaeological site, where the exact location is restricted, but it is publicly described as being near a particular locality, by geolocating the article with that of the locality. For other cases, there might not be any locality to use in this way, and perhaps the use of very approximate coordinates might be a good idea for these cases. In any case, if we do have that tag, it should not be applied too widely, and just kept for edge cases like sensitive archological sites whose location is not already well-known. — The Anome (talk) 11:08, 5 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  "coord restricted"?