Talk:Mapcode

I think it would be a good idea to create a wikipedia template that can convert mapcodes to coords and vice versa. What are other peoples' thoughts? Wayne Jayes (talk) 08:57, 13 November 2015 (UTC)

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Sorry for this being my personal opinion, yet it seems relevant to the current state of the article. I am very disappointed to see the main article described with the comment: "may not meet Wikipedia's general notability guidelines". That, IMO, is very disappointing. Mapcodes should be notable, they are used in all the more recent TomTom navigation devices. They are a sensible and practical idea to solve a problem of location and navigation.

 What is surprising is that they do not have higher visibility. Even on the official TomTom website and accompanying user forums they are hardly ever mentioned. Am I 'pushing' mapcodes? Yes! Because I think they make sense and are useful. 146.200.94.111 (talk) 16:44, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

They are useful, but there needs to be more takeup by other GPS receiver manufacturers. Compare the LOC8 code in Ireland which was very closed source, but is supported on some Garmin satnavs. I was supportive of OpenPostcodes until the grid was altered in an opportunistic response to the introduction of Eircodes. MapCode claims to be open source but I believe it could still be more open. MapCode does have the advantage of being supported by TomTom and they have also submitted their algorithm as an International Standard which might help to bring TomTom's competitors on board.

Other issues I have, are with national and regional codes which have political and practicality issues. US states each have their own system of codes which are different to the overall USA code and different still to the world one. There is no doubt much commerce between towns and cities across state lines and if people have to set the state surely it will take longer than keying in the USA one. Also there is a dependency on a proprietary mapping dataset for determining if a place lies in a national or regional area, and that dataset does not seem to be completely open source.

I would like to see this article have a detailed description of the code algorithm. For world coordinates outside of the poles, this seems fairly straightforward. For national coordinates perhaps less so, as I notice that within the West Bank and Gaza the Palestinian and Israeli codes are the same, but for many places in Israel proper, where a Palestine code is still offered, they are different. In comparison, British and Irish codes in Northern Ireland are different and I am sure many people and businesses in the region would give both, or just the Irish one. Rugxulo (talk) 17:49, 3 April 2016 (UTC)