Talk:Geographic center of the contiguous United States

Wrong coordinates

Hi,

what's wrong with the coordinates?

Instead of W they lead to EAST in Google Earth - some place in China? 62.216.218.146 (talk) 11:11, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Proper noun?

Should this article be at "Geographic Center of the Contiguous United States", or at "Geographic center of the contiguous United States"? Unless the term is a proper noun, I would think the latter. Is it a proper noun? Compare to Geographic centers of the United States, Geographical center of Sweden, Geographical centre of Europe, etc.   Will Beback  talk  02:58, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

Seeing no further comment, I'll move it.   Will Beback  talk  10:03, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

Bad math?

Where are you getting your figures in the "methods of calculation" section? The middle between Northwest Angle (49°23'4"N) and Ballast Key (24°31′15″N) is 36°57'9.5"N, not 37°15'2" N. And the middle between Bodelteh Islands (124°46'18"W) and West Quoddy Head (66°56'49"W) is 95°51'33.5"W, not 96°21'30" W. This would put you about 8km NE of Copan, OK and 9km SE of Caney, KS, about 55km SE of the coordinates given here. -JamesyWamesy (talk) 19:49, 6 April 2010 (UTC)

Jamesy, if those calculations are correct (latitude 36°57N and longitude 95°51W), that is in Chelsea, OK. Very close though. Michelle1228 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 20:59, 14 September 2010 (UTC).

That entire section appears to be original research. Does it point to some sort of a standard measurement that's commonly used, or is the author just speculating about one way to find the center of the 48? If it's the latter, then it's OR and should be pulled out. If it's the former, then we need a citation.. Ommnomnomgulp (talk) 01:00, 20 September 2010 (UTC)

I'm removing the section for now since it seems to be OR. Ommnomnomgulp (talk) 16:04, 23 September 2010 (UTC)

Geographic center including AK and HI?

After reading this page, I was interested to find out where the center is if you include AK and HI (and more specifically, how anyone would calculate such a thing), so I clicked on the link to Geographic centers of the United States, which lists it as Belle Fourche, SD but provides no more information. When I went to the Belle Fourche, South Dakota page, it links to the page Geographic Center of the United States, but that page does not exist and redirects to this one. It seems like there should be an explanation of how Belle Fourche was calculated, whether on this page, Belle Fourche's page, or its own page (or even simply a citation on one of the pages that mentions this fact). 24.148.38.207 (talk) 14:10, 17 April 2010 (UTC)

...What's with the plush duck? 99.191.71.189 (talk) 09:14, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

In Popular Media

Shouldn't it be noted that this place is of some significance in Neil Gaiman's American Gods? Like it's done in Trivia or In Popular Culture sections in other articles? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.169.10.163 (talk) 05:04, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

1918

Can anyone find a reliable reference to the "1918 survey". While this date is given on many websites, I haven't found anything that actually points to such a survey. This document describing the selection of the nearby Meades Ranch Triangulation Station as the U.S. standard datum notes that the geographic center was viewed as near Lebanon Kansas as early as 1901. I think the article should be tweaked to emphasize that the Geographic center of the contiguous United States is more of a tourist/chamber of commerce thing than a scientifically measured and useful point. It seems clear from the Oscar Adams 1932 paper that even though the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey thought the center was a imprecise guesstimate, and a wide variety of answers were equally valid, people kept asking for a number, so one was provided - with, I think a sigh. Generic1139 (talk) 02:32, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

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Incorrect information about MaxMind mapping

This statement in the Overview section is incorrect: "In an unusual technical glitch, a farmstead northeast of Potwin, Kansas became the default site of 600 million IP addresses (due to their lack of fine granularity) when the Massachusetts-based digital mapping company MaxMind changed the putative geographic center of the contiguous United States from 39.8333333,-98.585522 to 38.0000,-97.0000." I recommend deleting it.

The geographic latitude and longitude coordinates MaxMind used for the US were taken from the CIA World Factbook and were not intended to represent the geographic center of the US. See the Geographic Coordinates section of the US page where the CIA gives 38 00 N, 97 00 W as coordinates for the US. As such, the use of these coordinates was not the result of a technical glitch nor was MaxMind changing the putative geographic center of the US as mentioned in the above quote. See https://web.archive.org/web/20130503091315/http://dev.maxmind.com/geoip/legacy/codes/country_latlon where MaxMind published the latitudes and longitudes used for various countries in their GeoIP Legacy products, each taken from the CIA World Factbook. Jasonketola (talk) 14:13, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Hmm. That's not what the source cited in the article claims, which doesn't mention anything about the World Factbook. As much as I would love to take your word that the coordinates chosen were based on the CIA publication, under Wikipedia policy you should support your statement with a reliable source that is also independent of MaxMind (i.e. no press releases, no official company webpages). Thanks, Altamel (talk) 04:53, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

You can find the CIA World Factbook coordinates for the US here: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2011.html#us. The article used as a source in the entry states "Technically, the latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates of the center spot are 39°50′N 98°35′W. In digital maps, that number is an ugly one: 39.8333333,-98.585522. So back in 2002, when MaxMind was first choosing the default point on its digital map for the center of the U.S., it decided to clean up the measurements and go with a simpler, nearby latitude and longitude: 38°N 97°W or 38.0000,-97.0000." without citing a source. If it were the case that MaxMind wanted to clean up the data, presumably it would have been much more likely to pick 40.0000,-99.0000 or 39.0000,-98.00000 (using rounding or truncation). The article suggests a very strange choice in cleaning data was made, and again without citing a souce. Does the link to the CIA World Factbook clear up where these rather different lat/lon coordinates came from? Thanks, Jason Jasonketola (talk) 13:36, 14 October 2016 (UTC)

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Where was it before 1912?

I ask this because I came across this map in the last couple of days, which in 1909 showed a marker at a site inside Fort Riley, in Northeastern Kansas. I found elsewhere on the internet an story that said the location was incorrectly believed to be the center, and I would think that before Arizona and New Mexico, the point would be a little further north, but I don't know. It's apparently an imprecise matter, so this could be as "right" as it needs to be:

Enlarge map, look middle left.

In any case, is this worth mentioning in the article? RM2KX (talk) 21:03, 25 March 2017 (UTC)

The "incorporated" U.S. Territory of Palmyra Island should be included

The versions include the centre of the contiguous 48 United States, and the centre of the whole country including Hawaii and Alaska. These are still only partial, because of an American Supreme Court legal case Downes v. Bidwell, one of the so-called Insular Cases. That case defined what is considered to be part of the U.S.A. by defining "incorporated" and "unincorporated" American territories. The incorporated ones are part of the country, but the unincorporated ones merely "appertain" to the country but are not part of it. Formerly there were several incorporated territories like the Territory of Arizona, but now almost all American possessions are "unincorporated", like Guam, American Samoa, Navassa Island, etc., and places like Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba are technically just leased. Since Hawaii became an American state in 1959, there is (apart from the District of Columbia) one remaining American "incorporated" territory, the United States Territory of Palmyra Island. It seems that the definitive geographic centre of the United States of America should be based on including the Territory of Palmyra Island in the calculation.99.118.152.133 (talk) 16:12, 29 March 2017 (UTC)

I might agree, except that the NGS has concluded that there is no definitive answer, leaving the request kind of a moot point. I imagine it would shift the center into southern Kansas at most, and regardless of where it was, we would have to find a reliable source reporting it to include it here. RM2KX (talk) 00:42, 30 March 2017 (UTC)

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Incredibly poor description of the method

In 1918, the Coast and Geodetic Survey found this location by balancing on a point a cardboard cutout shaped like the U.S.[5]

Just following the link show that is not how it was done. HughesJohn (talk) 12:58, 23 October 2020 (UTC)