On 10/5/08, Delirium <delirium(a)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.