[Wikipedia-l] Geographical coordinates now slightly easier to use

[para]

Good news to everyone who has ever clicked on geographical coordinates 
on Wikipedia only to find themselves in the middle of a long list of 
unrelated external services. We have now improved the tool all those 
coordinates link to, GeoHack, and made it move the local section 
relevant to the requested coordinates to a location better visible, 
usually at the top of the page. This should make coordinates quicker and 
easier for readers to use, help standardize coordinate entry to a 
smaller set of templates and limit the need to fork other lists and 
structures for using geographical information on Wikipedia.

The functionality is based on the region parameter[1], which was used 
with the old geo extension already. There is now an added feature as 
well to find the region automatically if one hasn't been given, but it's 
approximative at the moment and in problematic cases an explicit region 
parameter should be added to the coordinates. The accuracy of the region 
estimation will be improved by time.


If your Wikipedia has translated the coordinate interface to a local 
version, you need to do two modifications to enable this functionality. 
Wrap all the sections in [[Template:Geotemplate]] related to a region 
like so:

  <div id="GEOTEMPLATE-XX"> ... </div>

where XX is the uppercase [[ISO 3166-1 alpha-2]] code of the region. 
Also place the following placeholder line to the location where the 
local section should be moved when a matching region is requested:

  <div id="GEOTEMPLATE-LOCAL" />

Styles can also be used to make the local service section even more 
visible, as long as it's defined after the element id. This has already 
been done on the English Wikipedia with 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:GeoTemplate>.


Big thanks to Magnus for the improvement!

Next up; making GeoHack back to a MediaWiki extension and installed on 
Wikipedia?

--Para

[1] 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geographical_coordinates#region:R>