Talk:Potwin, Kansas

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Sbmeirow (talk) 08:33, 19 December 2010 (UTC)

External links modified

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I have just modified 2 external links on Potwin, Kansas. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

• Corrected formatting/usage for http://www.kshs.org/geog/geog_postoffices/search/county:BU
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Incorrect information about MaxMind mapping

This statement in the 21st Century subsection is incorrect: "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 or modifying it for accuracy.

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. MaxMind simply used CIA World Factbook data. 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) 19:10, 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) 04:48, 19 April 2016 (UTC)

MaxMind has been sued, so presumably it'll all come out in discovery. kencf0618 (talk) 03:18, 11 August 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) 13:34, 14 October 2016 (UTC)