In the Swedish Wikipedia, there are only 12,600 coordinates in
10,600 articles. That is only 3 percent of all articles. These
numbers need to increase, and we're looking into various ways.
Just before we start to add coordinates to lots of articles, some
questions:
For small places, should we just add "type:landmark", or does it
make sense to clarify what is a church, what is a museum, what is
a statue, what is a grave, what is a remarkable tree, and so on?
These types of objects could be marked with different symbols on a
map, or you could select which kinds of objects you want to
display. Today, GeoHack or WikiMiniAtlas don't do any of that.
Is there a established procedure for adding new type values?
For villages/towns/cities, it is a custom to add type:city(9876)
with the population in parenthesis. But is this supported by
GeoHack or WikiMiniAtlas? Does the presentation scale (zoom
level) really change with the population? Or what purpose does
the population number really serve in the GeoHack URL?
Translating from population to map scale can only be a rough
guess, since some cities are densely packed, and others are spread
out. Do we need to specify scale for each place, in addition to
type (and population)?
Of the 183,000 coordinates in the German Wikipedia, some 76,000
specify the physical dimension, the diameter in metres, using the
parameter "dim", for example type:city_dim:25000. It seems that
this value is often one tenth of the scale parameter. Is this
supported by GeoHack or WikiMiniAtlas? Is it planned to be
supported in the future, or is it an old feature going away?
It is common that the coordinate template for creating the GeoHack
link is called indirectly from an infobox template. In that case,
the infobox template takes parameters such as lat_deg, lat_min,...
In the Swedish Wikipedia, we have tended to go away from that and
instead call the coordinate template directly from each article.
Is one way better than the other? Is there a global trend?
How will the introduction, presumably later this year, of inline
maps from OpenStreetMap, effect the questions above?
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se