Template talk:Coor/Archive 1

1

The debate is between localise - this template to be the only place where the URL for the Mapsources script is recorded, or distribute - the URL may be copied to other templates to reduce the overhead associated with meta-templates (nested templates is probably a better term).

"==Warning==

This is an experimental facility. To avoid problems when things change:

• definitely do not create any links to the external URL which this template calls. That includes not creating links in templates.
• instead use this or one of the templates which use this one. Or create a new template."

Distribute. The above "Warning" was added by RHaworth, and I disagree with it. This isn't experimental anymore. It might have been once, but it has grown to enormous usage. Because it is now used so widely, we must avoid using it as a meta-template, so as to reduce server overhead. There isn't much of an option here. If the link needs to change, it's trivial to update the templates documented above. -- Netoholic @ 9 July 2005 17:24 (UTC)

Localise. Certainly this isn't experimental any more but it is still external. At some stage, we hope, it will become an integral part of Wikipedia and the URL will change. It is not trivial to change multiple templates, it is human effort which could be avoided if we keep the URL localised. It is bad enough that the URL will need to be changed separately in each of the other language Wikis which use coor.

OK so it imposes a server overhead - I would rather donate for more hardware - how many dollars would you suggest? Probably the heaviest load on the servers from the use of meta-templates is Wikipedia:Votes for deletion - and no one is suggesting changes to that.

Even when the resource becomes permanent, I would recommend keeping the localisation. There is a proposal to maintain a Wiki index by geo-coordinates. Template:Coor could be the starting point from which to identify all articles with coordinates. -- RHaworth 16:35, 2005 July 12 (UTC)

Do remember that it's not something which can be handled by buying more servers - some of the nastiest effects which prompt it being an issue are cache flushing, which is based on the total number of pages using the template, and replication lag, based on the same thing. There are some changes in MediaWiki 1.5 which should reduce the replication lag effect (but not the cache purging one) but I haven't yet done enough monitoring to know just how effective they have been. Jamesday 18:20, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

In this case the balance may favor using the nested templates. The reason? The high chance of change in the future. But... how many templates include this? If it's no more than 50 or 100 it's still not a lot of work to do to change them all if the changes are going to happen perhaps once every six months. I haven't looked but this shoudl give some idea of how I see the balance between cost and benefit. If this is now stable and isn't likely to change much, it may well be worth embedding it directly instead of nesting. There are lots of mapping services and I for one hope we'll see much more support for mapping and GIS things in Wikipedia so personally, not speaking as a developer, this is one I'd leave as a nested template because I expect change fairly often. Jamesday 18:20, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

I think there are far less than 50-100 templates which use this particular URL. Unfortunately Special:Whatlinkshere/Template:Coor is practically useless since all those child templates and their articles show up linked to here (yet another reason to Wikipedia:avoid using meta-templates). I think the main issue is that a entire scheme has developed here that relies on an unreliable source. What if Egil moves on to other things, or he exceeds his ISP limits? I am more tempted than ever to in fact remove that as a resource from all except a very few sample templates, until a permanent solution is reached. Barring that, we should not have any trouble updating the templates documented above if the resource changes. Page me on my Talk page and I'll do it if noone else wants to. -- Netoholic @ 18:43, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

As this is a temporary solution and in order to limit self-references, we really should add the url link only to the coor template. Otherwise, Netoholic wouldn't just need to update every template on this website, but every website using wikipedia data after every new download version is available.

BTW when will the extension be enabled in Wikipedia? -- User:Docu

We should not be willing to sacrifice Wikipedia server performance for the sake downstream user convenience. -- Netoholic @ 23:42, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

Well it's to Avoid self-references. -- User:Docu

It is currently experimental

First of all, sorry for not answering earlier.

This service in its present form must be considered experimental, and I'm sure a change of URL needs to happen quite soon. It is currently being run on a facility that I pay for. No big money, but this service has a limited bandwidth quota, and the increased usage of the service means I am already (August 11th) at 65% of this months bandwidth quota. So something needs to be done, otherwise the ISP will shut it down. I had hoped that it could be run on Wikipedia machines instead, but I must admit I have not tried very hard to convince people. If the Gis extension is enabled for the Wiki servers themselves, it will also be a better service. See meta:Gis. -- Egil 17:11, 11 August 2005 (UTC)

Spacing

On Firefox on the Mac (but, curiously, not Safari/mac or Firefox/PC), there is a space between the minutes and the seconds, and a second space before N/S/E/W, which makes it look strange. Here's a (partial) example of the generated html:

<span style="white-space:nowrap">37°14′10″N</span>

which came from

{{coor dms|37|14|10|N|121|57|42|W|city}}

--Steve Pucci | talk 16:04, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

The formating of the coordinates on IE has same problem of awkward spacing. Just need to add a space after the degree sign. --MarsRover 02:46, 3 July 2006 (UTC)

Image:CoordsOnIE6.jpg

My preference would be to remove the extra spaces rather than adding the space after the degree sign. In inline text (as in a location article's geography section) the spaces are large compared to the surrounding text (perhaps because they are in a monospace font? I didn't check).

Image:CoordsOnMacFirefox.jpg

Note also that this is not a browser rendering issue. Somehow the html is being generated differently for different browsers. --Steve Pucci | talk 03:27, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Btw, when I look at Belgrade Nikola Tesla Airport or Los Gatos with IE 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.050301-1519 I don't see the spaces. --Steve Pucci | talk 03:40, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

I am using that version. Strangely, the actual HTML doesn't have any spaces. I actually like the spaces in this case since is make it more readable (provided we add the missing space). Can we have the template have the spaces configurable with a parameter? --MarsRover 05:55, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

Image:Ie6 coord bug.png

Special:Mapsources missing

What is the Special:Mapsources page talked about in the usage section? How do I use this template with decimal values? --Abdull 16:08, 3 October 2006 (UTC)

Special:Mapsources is currently unimplemented on the English wikipedia. See meta:Gis. --Grand Edgemaster _Talk 13:30, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Then the Usage section should be edited to reflect that. There's no good reason to have a red link in the usage section of the page on any widely used template. None. Mdotley 17:46, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

Moved documentation

Hi, I've moved the documentation from this Talk page to the Template:Coor/doc subpage, as recommended in Wikipedia:Template doc page pattern. Please edit the template to:

<span class="plainlinksneverexpand">[{{Coor URL}}{{{1}}} {{{2}}}]</span><noinclude>
{{protected template}}
{{{{FULLPAGENAME}}/doc}}
<!-- Add cats and interwikis to the /doc subpage, not here! -->
</noinclude>

Thanks. +mwtoews 20:26, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

Done —Mets501 (talk) 02:34, 27 December 2006 (UTC)

Proper minus signs instead of stubby little hyphens

93 degrees west longitude appears in articles using this template as

-93

whereas it should look like this:

−93

with a proper minus sign instead of a stubby little hyphen. From the point of view of mathematical typesetting conventions, the present appearance is incorrect. I'd fix it if I knew how. Can someone attend to this? Thanks. Michael Hardy 19:48, 3 August 2007 (UTC)

Positioning issues

Greetings,

I am having an issue with this template using Firefox (2.0.0.9) on Windows XP. The coordinates are shown to be overlapping the horizontal rule line that goes across the page under the title. Anyone else experiencing this? If not, I can provide a screenshot. spryde | talk 14:12, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Yes, me too, it looks terrible and is very annoying. 86.44.26.69 (talk) 03:25, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

Addition of altitude

Could I suggest altitude is added? I'm thinking specifically of satellites in geostationary orbit. The standard appears to be to state the latitude (e.g. see Astra 2A). It would also be useful to state the altitude (in this case around 35786km) so that 3d mapping systems such as Google Earth can correctly represent it.

Walt111 (talk) 23:41, 13 January 2008 (UTC)

Proper minus signs

Observe this difference:

Longitude -97

Longitude −97

These templates still, in 2008 make the minus sign to appear as a stubby little hyphens. Admittedly many newspapers do that, since they're not really accustomed to doing mathematical stuff, but by typesetting conventions used in books and in Wikipedia mathematics articles, using the stubby little hyphen is incorrect. I'd have fixed it if when I clicked on "edit" I had seen how to do so.

(Further usage note: When subtracting, one writes

5 − 3

with a space on either side of the minus sign, but when writing about a negative number, one writes

−3

with no intervening space. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (mathematics).)

These templates seems to be enforcing a very uncouth usage. Can someone fix this? Michael Hardy (talk) 21:32, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

This was mentioned at Template talk:Coord#Minus sign too, where I thought it would be possible to modify the display with MediaWiki parserfunctions. Now that I look at it again, it seems MediaWiki can't parse the minus character at all: when {{#ifexpr:-1<0|negative|positive}} works fine with the usual ASCII minus and is negative, the output of {{#ifexpr:−1<0|negative|positive}} displays:

negative

None of the popular online map services seem to support it either, for those copying and pasting coordinates. There's some edification to be done before changing any Wikipedia related code. --Para (talk) 22:08, 27 June 2008 (UTC)

Deprecated or Superseded

Template coord apparently was done as a replacement for the coor template family and other similar templates. Is there a reason that the coor template family should NOT be deprecated? Or at least have a Notice recommending to use coord instead, if coord is indeed the "better" / "favored" template? LeheckaG (talk) 20:45, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

Comment: It may be deprecated, but it is still the more common usage, with 230,000+ in the 2008/5/24 dump (about 120,000 for coord, if my counts are right). The Template:coor page says "This template is currently unused in article namespace" which seems to be a) poor grammar, and b) incorrect, if I'm reading it correctly. Perhaps someone with the ability to change the page could change it to something more accurate, like "this is deprecated, please use Template:coord for any new edits." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.5.188.87 (talk) 22:28, 12 July 2008 (UTC)

In fact, it's just {{coor}} that is unused, others are still widely used (e.g. {{coor title d}}, {{coor at d}}) and not deprecated. -- User:Docu (signature added per [1]: Docu (talk · contribs))