Hello,
I'm doing some work at the moment, informally using the English Wikipedia to help me identify and disambiguate toponyms (placenames). Unsurprisingly, it's bloody brilliant. Much better coverage than the "actual" gazetteer I'm using ( [[Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names]]). (Although Getty has canals aplenty, it doesn't seem to have too many streets.) Unfortunately the use of geographic co-ordinates is too spotty to only rely on Wikipedia. I wonder if we could find a suitable gazetteer, whether it might not be worth getting a bot to import those co-ordinates, if that's even possible...
Working with co-ordinates has made me wonder about their use. It seems a bit bizarre to represent a huge country (or ocean, river, etc) with one random dot. Is there any neat, standardised way to refer to geographic areas? I can't think of one...any ideas?
cheers Brianna en.wp:User:pfctdayelise