Based on the experience learned from WikiProject Geographical coordinates, I have prepared three Wikimedia extensions that you may find useful. The extensions can be enabled individually, but the concept is certainly more powerful when they are all enabled. I will briefly outline the extensions here: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A. The geo tag extension The <geo> tag allows entry of geographical coordinates something in style with RFC1876. For example: <geo>48 46 36 N 121 48 51 W</geo>. It is designed to be flexible, and easy to use. Variations of the above allows specification with decimals in various form, allowing less or more precision. Additional meta-data can also be specified as attributes for the location, like this: <geo>48 46 36 N 121 48 51 W type:mountain region:US scale:100000</geo> In the rendered article, the tag will be replaced with 48*°*46'36''N 121*°*48'51''W, which is also a Wikilink to a page of map resources for that point. The main geo tag advantages are: 1. Consistent markup for coordinates. 2. Consistent rendering of coordinates. 3. Wikipedia articles with coordinates will get a 'geo.position' meta tag, making it compatible with Internet geographic resources, such as geourl.org. 4. Serves as an enabler for the two other extensions. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- B. The map sources extension The map sources extension is the target of the <geo> tag wikilink, and provides a page of available Internet map resources, in a manner much like the ISBN resource page. The extension provides functionality to 'preload' external URLs with coordinates, so that most maps are essentially one click away. There are currently 30 different built in replacement strings, supporting various form of specification of scaling and coordinates, such as UTM, OSGB36 and CH1903. There exists specialized versions of the map sources page for various regions (like US and GB). For the global version, there are at present preloaded pointers to around 20 different map engines. In addition to the maps, there is a pointer to GeoURL.org, which lists nearby resources on the Internet. There is also a direct link for the open source NASA World Wind software, allowing a new, interactive way of experiencing for aerial imagery and topological data. World Wind has a plug-in layer for Wikipedia articles that are tagged with a geographic coordinate. Assuming the enabling of extension C, there is also a pointer to neighborhood articles in Wikipedia, listing the articles with Wikilinks, and their distance and direction from the present point. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- C. The geo database extension The geo database keeps track of all articles in Wikipedia with geographic coordinates, and provides the data source for the neighborhood information, as well as the data source for other external mechanisms taking advantage of the Wikipedia geographical information, such as the NASA World Wind Wikipedia overlay. Additionally, the geo database will provide data for the future Wikimap, so that the maps produced by Wikimaps will contain all the relevant information from Wikipedia as clickable points. For this, geo attributes are crucial: Airports really should appear as airports on the map, mountains as mountains, and cities as cities, with the right magnitude. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For further information, see also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geographical_coordinates ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Status Currently extensions A and B are quite well developed, and have been tested for a time on an external server. Additionally, a few thousand articles in the en: Wikipedia are marked with geographic coordinates using an interim solution with templates, as a proof-of-concept. They will be converted to the geo tag if this extension gets enabled for the English Wikipedia. That will also solve the current problem with coordinates as arguments for infobox templates. Collection of data points have been done with an interim, external solution based on some Perl scripts. Extension C has also been implemented, but I would want to discuss a few issues of performance and security before committing the code. More about this later. Magnus Manske has been extremely helpful in the work on integration with Wikimaps, and that work will continue. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Questions Starting with extensions A and B, I have some questions: 1. How should translations for extensions be handled? It would of course not be a problem adding to the existing resources in phase3/languages, but does translations for extensions belong there? 2. Should extensions be put in the extensions module or in the phase3/extensions directory? 3. Should these 3 extensions be put in the same place (requiring only one include in Localsettings.php to enable), or in 3 different directories?. I am currently using 3 different extensions, but I think having just one is better. I am also wondering about naming and policy. "Geo" seems to be taken. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Finally, I would like to give a big thank you to all participants in WikiProject Geographical coordinates who have helped immensely with suggestions practical work. Regards, Egil Kvaleberg en:User:Egil