On 18/12/12 16:52, Denny Vrandečić wrote:
Thank you for your comments, Marco. 2012/12/18 Marco Fleckinger <marco.fleckinger@wikipedia.at mailto:marco.fleckinger@wikipedia.at> IMHO it would be make sense to have something hybrid. The datatype for geolocation should accept something like a NAN-value for optional altitudes. But it should also be possible to use altitudes without longitude and latitude.
Why would it make sense to have both? What is the altitude in the geolocation good for? Is there an example in Wikipedia where it is or would be used, and where a property of its own would not be better?
While at it, why not separate longitude and latitude? There are items that only have one, f.e. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_meridian
IMHO it would make sense to use the [[International System of Units]] for internal storage. It is not consequently used in other realms, not even in the German spoken countries (PS vs. kW for cars). Maybe it would be possible to use small scripts (such as WP-templates) to transcalc values, which can easily be developed by the community.Internally we would translate it, yes, otherwise the numbers would not be comparable. But for editing we need to keep the unit of the source / of the editor, or else we will loose precision.
What I wanted to say. Additionally, in some cases historical units are not accurate or accurately known, so possibly we won't even be able to make the conversion.