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