Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Archive 10

message: A major problem with geocoding interoperability is the use of British OSGB36 National Grid coordinates in UK articles. Since most UK high-resolution geodata is held in OSGB36 coordinates, and they are ideally suited to high-precision use for locations in the UK, their use in UK-based articles is a Good Thing. 
However,  converting between them and lat-long coordinates is non-trivial. (see this document for an authoritative reference). Unfortunately, this means that most programs that scrape Wikipedia's database dumps will not be able to understand these coordinates, and that UK articles, which are actually some of the most consistently georeferenced in Wikipedia, will appear to be almost devoid of georeferences from the point of view of such software. Since other countries also have similar national grid systems, this problem probably also occurs in other Wikipedia editions. 
The best long-term solution, in my opinion, would be to natively support OSGB36, and other specialized coordinate systems, from within the MediaWiki geodata extension. High-resolution lat-long coordinates could then be kept updated in an auxiliary database table, which would track geodata references of all sorts as they were added to Wikipedia articles, and this table could be made available through dumps.
One possible interim solution would be to have a tag which would combine OSGB and lat-long coordinates in a single tag, where the OSGB coordinates would be the master reference, with the lat-long coordinates updated to match the OSGB coordinates, perhaps by a bot, or perhaps as part of the article save logic. -- The Anome 14:23, 13 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: There are a *LOT* of different datums in use around the world.  For example, when I used to do geospatial work in Florida I mostly dealt with data in NAD27 and NAD83 Florida east state plane. WGS84 lat/long is the international standard. EGM96 is slightly more accurate (wow, we don't even have an article on it) but it isn't widely used yet. It isn't bad to offer data in multiple coordinate systems, but when we expect others to read our data we should expect to put it in an internationally acceptable format.  I'll be glad to write a bot that reprojects OSGB36 to WGS84 for tagging purposes. --Gmaxwell 20:33, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  National Grid problems 

message: New KML in more languages now available. Have Fun! It is a part of Wikipedia-World -- sk 23:41, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  New Data from Wikipedia for Google Earth  

message: There is a note at Talk:Main Page#Positioning of appeal banner that coordinates listed using the coor title temmplates are clashing with the donations banner.  I know that in previous funding drives, the positioning of the coordinates was temporarily changed.  Is there a solution if some users see the banner and some don't? - BanyanTree 03:19, 22 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  donations banner 

message: Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 19:49, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wikipedia Day Awards 

message: In german wikipedia we discuse the problem, that we can only use one geotag per article for maps and so on (Wikipedia-World). 
An example is RAF_Museum which is located in London and in Cosford.
So we want to use a new parameter with the name "section" or so. There should be two ways to use this parameter: 
#With specialword section:sub we would use for the map the adequate subheading. For instance: RAF_Museum#London site or RAF_Museum#Cosford site. So the link from the map follow to the right point in the article.
#With section:ownname you can declare an own name if the first methode not works, for instance in a table. So in the map you will see Article#ownname, the link will go to the right article, but not to the right point in the article. The geotag could looks so:
#From Geotags without a "section", only the first one would be in the map.   
Is it understandable? Is it OK so? Would other names better(shorter)? My english is not the best. Thanks.  :de:Benutzer:Kolossos 11:56, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  New parameter for Geotags 

message: Just published... http://earth.google.com/userguide/v4/geoweb_faq.html (Caniago 17:21, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I repeat me: the Community Layer from Wikipedia-World is better. I generate a  list of template-usage you can see, which templates google lost.  On the other side, less templates would be better. Kolossos 21:21, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for providing your service Kolossos. I agree it is better in most respects, except your popup windows which don't provide the article summary information which the Google Earth service does. However, since the Google service is built into Google Earth more people are likely using it, so we should work to ensure compatibility between our data and their service. BTW, its been a while since your database was last updated, when is the next update due? (Caniago 08:17, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: We are waiting for the next dump(en+de), thats should be in the next days. :de:Benuter:Kolossos 13:24, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Hello, today I had make scan for coordinates in en! I create a new KMZ-File for Google Earth. I think Kolossos will be update the database in the next days. -- sk 20:06, 11 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Wikipedia-World is now updated. :de:Benutzer:Kolossos11:49, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  FAQ: Google Earth Geographic Web Layer 

message: I seem to recall that these templates used to take you to a list of useful choices, such as randmcnally, topozone, mapquest, etc.  Now they take you to tools.wikimedia.de, which is extremely slow. Response times in minutes or tens of minutes, at least for me (running Mozilla on Debian stable; I seem to remember occasionally getting faster responses on Windows, which is a red flag in itself).
Isn't there a way around tools.wikimedia.de, or can the latter at least be sped up? --Trovatore 08:29, 25 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Can't the templates provide a way around tools.wikimedia.de?

message: Hello all! We've installed the coordenates templates in our Wikipedia and linked it to the German page. Our template category is :eu:Kategoria:Koordenatu txantiloiak and we're now working with a little information, but trying to put all basque towns and villages with it's coordinate. We would like to know how to make a dump in order to see WikiMiniAtlas links and Google Earth links in basque. Is it possible? If we have to make it, I'm ready to work on it. Please, if someone knows how, contact me on :eu:Lankide eztabaida:Theklan. - :eu:Lankide:Theklan
:The dumps are performed by :de:User:Stefan Kühn‎. And the data is available at :de:Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Georeferenzierung/Wikipedia-World/en. I'll have to update WikiMiniAtlas to allow for a Basque edition. This is a non-trivial task, as ithe Coordinate data has to be added to my serverside programm.--Dschwen(A) 07:18, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: So when the program makes it it will be possible to see the links? That's great! If I can help, please contact me. -Theklan.eu 12:28, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Basque Wikipedia 

message: There are quite a lot of articles (and also panoramio photos, google community links etc.) at , due to empty coordinate templates in articles. It seems like most of the misplaced articles are italian towns like e.g. Nissoria.  Is there a generic way to find all these to fix or at least delete them, so in a future update GE that point will not look like the center of the universe anymore? It shouldn't be much difficult to change the program which creates the Community Layer accordingly. andy 17:00, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'll take a look at this. I've added a lot of Italian towns by bot recently; it should be easy to add the coordinates for the other communities automatically. Eugène van der Pijll 10:38, 19 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Empty coordinate templates 

message: I need some help with this cat. It appears many people are opposed to this idea but I fail to see the discussion in the Cfd (Category for discussion). All I see is a big poll of votes. --CyclePat 21:07, 3 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Help for [[:category:Cities in the UTC timezone]]