On 10/5/08, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Some of that could be improved by making each of the articles themselves provide higher-level orientation. For example, most of our articles on German cities place them as a dot on the map of *all of Germany*, rather than only on a map of the state they're in, letting the reader who knows "I know it's somewhere in western Germany" quickly figure out if they're even in the right part of the country.
The different treatment is alll about familiarity, a.k.a. systemic bias. Try asking a hundred Americans to name two states in Germany.
Twenty of them will say "Bavaria, uhhh..." and 71 of them will just say "Uhhh..."
Our U.S. maps generally don't, although they've semi-recently been improved to at least show city locations within states instead of only within counties. But the non-American user who goes search for something like: I want a city named Foo, somewhere in the middle of the country, and doesn't know which U.S. states are in the middle of the country, might well want to click directly on wikilinked state names to narrow down the search before clicking on the articles themselves. Either that, or we could place cities on maps of the entire U.S. instead of only on maps of their states, but the U.S.'s geographical size makes these maps often not that useful for any other purpose (on the other hand, the maps on [[Moscow]] and [[Saint Petersburg]] provide examples of useful very-zoomed-out locations).
I agree entirely. We could use a nice how-to page for this. I know "how to make an SVG" but not how "how to efficiently make a lot of SVGs".
—C.W.