Any Wikipedian may participate in this project to better organize information in articles containing geographical coordinates. This page and its subpages contain suggestions; it is hoped that this project will help to focus the efforts of other Wikipedians. If you would like to help, please include yourself as participant, inquire on the talk page and see the to-do list there.
NOTE: This is a concept currently under development, so this is subject to change.
Title
WikiProject on Geographical coordinates
Scope
This WikiProject aims primarily to establish a standard for uniform handling of latitude and longitude coordinates as given in various Wikipedia articles, somewhat analogous to how ISBN numbers are handled.
Parentage
The parent of this WikiProject is WikiProject Maps.
Descendant WikiProjects
No descendant WikiProjects have been defined.
Similar WikiProjects
Other WikiProjects that make use of geographical coordinates include:
Participants
Markup
The practical usage of this system for Wikipedia markup is described in the style guide for geographical coordinates.
In addition, a template for making ordinary text links to the maps is available through the coor template.
Goals
- Should provide a uniform markup and appearance for all geographics coordinates
- Markup should be easy and natural to use
- Should be able to have a uniform, extensible way of accesing all types of map resouces, avoiding having direct external links to maps in articles
- Clicking on the reference navigates directly to a page with external pointers to various resources, with coordinates automatically embedded where possible. The resources can be maps of various kinds, topological charts, satellite photos and others.
- Create a database of points, enabling generation of navigatable maps with a clickable icon appearing for every location for which there is a Wikipedia article. This has been implemented for NASA World Wind.
- Serve as a tool for finding Wikipedia articles describing nearby locations. See also .
- Adher to existing Internet standards for geographic coordinates as far as possible
Examples
All examples use NASA World Wind, with the Wikipedia overlay. This is purely meant as an example of one thing that a coordinated concept for geographical coorindates can be used for.
Links to Wikipedia articles are represented by yellow rings, such as in this view of the Washington DC National Mall, using USGS aerial photos:
This view of San Francisco is done using Landsat 7 satellite images. Again, note the rings that indicate Wilkipedia articles:
Combining radar topographic (Shuttle Radar Topography Mission ) data with Landsat-7 images allows full 3D visualization, producing images like this one, of Mount Baker. The upper ring is for the Space Needle. Note also that vertical exaggeration is enabled:
Implementation details
Geo tag
To define a geographical point, the Mediawiki gis extension is required. For further information, see the Mediawiki documentation .
NOTE: This extension is available, but is currently not enabled for Wikipedia. The functionality is thus currently only available via the template:coor familiy, which is an interim solution.
The geo tag specifies the coordinates as degrees/minutes/seconds of latitude and longitude, like this:
- <geo>48 46 36 N 121 48 51 W</geo>.
In the finished article, the tag will appear as.
The seconds and also minutes can be omitted as desired, and additional precision can be added using decimals.
Parameters
Following the geographical coordinate, further parameters can optionally be supplied, separated by underscores. This will help in finding suitable map resources, and will become more important when the Wikimaps become fully functional.
type:T
Sets the type of this location, which will be used for the reverse mapping of the points. Will also set the default map scale. Types are:
| country
| (e.g. "type:country")
| 1:10,000,000
|
| state
| Where applicable
| 1:3,000,000
|
| adm1st
| Administrative unit of country, 1st level (province, county)
| 1:1,000,000
|
| adm2nd
| Administrative unit of country, 2nd level
| 1:300,000
|
| city(pop)
| City, with specified population. Commas will be ignored in pop. There should be no blanks.
| 1:30,000 ... 1:300,000
|
| city
| City, unspecified population. Will be treated as a minor city.
| 1:100,000
|
| airport
|
| 1:30,000
|
| mountain
|
| 1:100,000
|
| isle
|
| 1:100,000
|
| landmark
| Cultural landmark, building of special interest, tourist attraction and other points of interest.
| 1:10,000
|
scale:N
Sets the desired map scale as 1:N. This will override the default scale. The scale: prefix can be omitted.
region:R
Sets the preferred map region of coverage, used in selecting appropriate map resources for the area. The region should be supplied as either a two character ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code, or an ISO 3166-2 region code. Examples:
globe:G
Specifies other worlds than earth. Such as Moon.
The map source page
To generate the list of map sources, the Mediawiki gis extension is required. The definition of the map sources page is via Wikipedia:Map sources. For further information, see the Mediawiki documentation .
NOTE: This mechanism is available, but currently not enabled for Wikipedia, The currently solution is running on an external server as a proof-of-concept, and is available via the template:coor familiy. The map source page produced is defined in the editable http://kvaleberg.com/wiki/index.php/Wiki:Map_sources (note that you have to be logged out there to edit, otherwise you get "Internal error"). In the interim solution, the URL of the actual map sources page request is:
http://kvaleberg.com/extensions/mapsources/index.php?params=48_46_36_N_121_48_51_W. The argument follows the same format as the geo tag.
Templates
See Template talk:Coor dms for a practical way of entering geographical coordinates.
If creating new templates, it is important that they are defined using Template:coor. See Template:coor d for an example.
Bugs
- The current template mechanism does not handle templates as arguments to templates. This problem will go away with the geo tag. Note, however, that the geo tag cannot have arguments when used in a template definition.
How to obtain geographical coordinates
See Geographic coordinates (obtaining)
Geodetic system
All coordinates should be referenced to WGS84, or an equivalent datum.
Series of coordinates
Coordinates formatted through Template:Coor
By template used directly in the article:
-
- Template:coor dm (uses, talk)
- Template:coor dms (uses, talk)
- Template:Mapit-US-cityscale (uses, talk)
- Template:Geolinks-US-cityscale (uses, talk)
- Template:Geolinks-US-streetscale (uses, talk)
- Template:Infobox Kommune (uses, talk) (municipalities of Norway)
- Template:Infobox Dutch municipality 3 (uses, talk )
- Template:Infobox Frisian-Dutch municipality (uses, talk )
- Template:Infobox Dutch-Frisian municipality (uses, talk )
- Template:Infobox Swiss town (uses, talk)
- Template:Infobox national park (uses, talk )
By category/source/topic of articles:
By format of coordinates:
- Articles matching, e.g. cur_text RLIKE '([0-9]+)°([0-9]+)\'([NS]), ([0-9]+)°([0-9]+)\'([EW])'
- most articles with coordinates in dms format
- many articles with coordinates in dm format
Articles about to be formatted through templates
- articles with coordinates in dm format
Articles with coordinates, but not linked to Template:Coor
/Various formats
Articles/infoboxes
Infoboxes in Templates
Templates creating links to online maps:
See also
External links
References
Find coordinates of a place to add to Wikipedia
