Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Archive 1

message: You, in your examples, padded zeros in your entry for the minutes and seconds.  But that is not a feature of the template, at least not yet.  You also did not pad a second zero in the longitude degrees.  Gene Nygaard 12:04, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: As it is now, padding of zeros is accepted (there was a bug which is now gone), and the padding will appear just as in the template arguments. With todays template mechanism, I think there is no other way. -- Egil 12:16, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  padding with zeros 

message: Is there any way the template can do some error checking of range of numbers, as well as convert them from text to numbers to aid in making consistent padding of the numbers?  
I'd like to see something like the "Did not parse" errors in TEX entry.  Gene Nygaard 12:04, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: No error checking yet, this should of course be implemented at some stage. -- Egil 12:21, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

text: Done. -- Egil 16:52, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Error checking on entry 

message: You have your minutes and seconds symbols reversed.  Gene Nygaard 12:04, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The source text for this is in fact on Wikipedia, so anyone can edit on Wikipedia:Map sources. What is off Wikipedia is the script. -- Egil 12:20, 14 Feb 2005 (UTC)

text: Comment: In the next PHP off-site implementation now being used, the page is off-site, but still editable. Follow the map sources link. -- Egil 16:48, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Error in off-Wikipedia map sources page 

message: I was just going to suggest a scale argument but I see you're working on it.  Implementing this is going to be tricky though.  Perhaps you would consider the model we have used for geolinks: "cityscale", "buildingscale", etc.  The named scales is (I hope) an easier way for editors to remember what size they really want.  The tricky part of course is translating this into the right "zoom" arguments for any particular web page; as you know they mostly use their own specific formats (i.e. zoom=5 on mapquest means something totally different from s=5 on terraserver).  One thing that I think would work would be to use a "cityscale" style argument to your script as a string for another template name.
I'm not sure if I can explain this clearly off the cuff, but here goes: imagine I pass in "city" as the final argument to one of your templates.  This then becomes the value for  on your special page.  You then link to mapquest using (psuedocode): 
 mapquest.com/?lat=&lon=&zoom= 
and to terraserver using (psuedocode): 
 terraserver.com/?lat=&lon=&zoom=
I believe this should work and result in the template  and  being loaded in as the scale arguments.  My mind gets kind of boggled trying to remember MW's rules for loading templates but for an off-the-cuff trial see User:Chinasaur/Sandbox.  Here I've used PAGENAME as a standin for your special variables since I believe they behave in similar ways.  As you can see, the code correctly requests a template whose name depends on the value of PAGENAME.  This approach will cause a proliferation of templates for all the different scales (city, county, building, street, hood, or whatever you decide on) and for all the different webpages, but I think that's okay, and this way it's transparent to editors and easily tweakable.
:The intention was to base everything on a scale, and make the script supply scale factors as required for different URLs. (One thought: It should probably be allowed to enter 1e6 in addition to 1000000) Currently, the following is available:
:: which is the scale as a decimal number
:: which is the altitude equivalent that MSN uses (143 for 1:1000000)
:: which is the equivalent zoom factor for Mapquest
:: suitable for Google and US Census (needs calibration)
:I'm sure there are other quirky ways of defining scale, but hopefully they can be accomodated. Multimap uses a scale, but it has to be from a fixed list of about 10 different ones. A mechanism for that needs to be implemented.
:So hopefully the countryscale/cityscale/buildingscale concept can be implemented in form of supplying a default scale? -- Egil 08:41, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: A lot of my suggestions were from the mindset of trying not to hard-code things.  Your approach of using a single scale in the template and then having that generate a bunch of different scale parameters for different web sites is a natural solution.  But what do you do if an editor wants to add a new map page with a new scale parameter?  I went through all these template gymnastics with the idea that we wanted a system that is open to multiple editors; it's clearly undesireable to require a system patch to add new variables of these types.  You don't want people to have to come to you anytime they want to change things...  --Chinasaur 08:04, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Hardcoded parameters for various map sources is defintely something I would want to avoid. If Wikipedia maprkup gets expression evaluation that could fix a lot of things, otherwise I can always make various configurable scaling parameters in the Map sources. In due course. -- Egil 21:04, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dealing with scale