Template talk:GeoGroup/Archive 1

Archive 1

Archive 2

New link target

User:Paradisal ("Para") recently changed the target of the first link in this template, from Brian Suda's site, to one which Para apparently hosts himself. The latter provides KML files with the "name" property of "Geodata from Wikipedia"; whereas Brian's site uses the page title, for example "List of volcanoes in the United States of America - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". The loss of such useful data should be rectified, or the original link restored.

I'm also waiting for Para to answer my question about what exactly it is, that his service parses. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 11:16, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Name changed to page title. I have already answered[1][2] your parsing question that the service parses coordinates from Wikipedia articles. Brian's script seems to rely on microformats only and is incapable of converting other coordinates, unlike my tool. Feel free to notify me if you notice missing information with some article. --Para 20:10, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

I asked you to be explicit about how you were deriving the coordinates. You have, so far, avoided answering that question. Please do so now. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 21:03, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

It's a work in progress and the implementation can change at any time, which is why explaining the internals is not necessary or even relevant. The purpose of the tool is to parse any Wikipedia coordinates entered with community approved templates and generate a KML out of them. It is designed for Wikipedia use only, and covers more cases than the other more general use tool. That's as explicit as you'll get. If you notice missing information somewhere, feel free to post an improvement request for consideration. --Para 08:19, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

I note that you're refusing to give a direct answer to my question. I wonder why that is. Is there something you're trying to hide? What is you definition of "community approved templates", and what other templates are you excluding? Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 16:42, 11 August 2007 (UTC)

Ownership of multi-coordinates parsing service

It seems that Para is refusing to answer my questions. I wonder why. Note that by changing this template from its original purpose, of parsing hCard and geo microformats, using Brian Suda's open-source-code service, and which works with any Wiki-project page (including other-language Wikipedias, WikiCommons, and so on; and of course other websites) to parsing only Wikipedia coordinates templates, he has made it use a service which he owns, and which is not, apparently open. It does not work with calls from other Wiki-foundation sites, only Wikipedia-EN. It also gives him an effective, personal veto over which coordinates templates he deems acceptable.

Note also that the template, as currently configured to use Paras's service, does not detect the coordinates in the Geo microformat on our Geo microformat page. Those coordinates were recognised by the template as set up, using Suda's service.

Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 12:59, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

The purpose of external links on Wikipedia is to provide more or better information about the topics covered in articles. The currently linked tool built for Wikipedia use fulfills that purpose much better than the old one that parses microformats only, by parsing all coordinates on the English Wikipedia entered with a community approved method. The obscure HTML markup on Geo (microformat) has not been approved by the Wikipedia community as a data entry method, and is therefore not parsed. When the English Wikipedia implements exemplary functionality for coordinate annotation that others can follow, I will add support for Wikipedias in other languages. I doubt there is enough interest from other projects, so they can use any other tools they see fit. Again, if you notice missing information somewhere in the result of the KML export, feel free to drop me a note. --Para 13:37, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

You're still equivocating, and being disingenuous if not dishonest. You have yet to make clear how text labels for coordinates are derived (with microformats, that's explicitly clear). All coordinates on Wikipedia should use microformats, as soon as conversion to {{coord}} (which you currently oppose; just as you opposed this template) is completed. Microformat markup does have community support. Both de facto, and expressly. Crippling this template to make your flawed proposal to alter {{coord}} seem necessary is underhand, and harms the project. Coordinates from other Wiki projects, which already use microformats, can already be parsed by Suda's service, but not yours. Some improvement; you've just proved my point about your personal veto. I have already given an example of a page parsed by the Suda service, but not yours. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 13:48, 19 August 2007 (UTC)

Andy alias Pigsonthewing: I wonder about the energy you are putting into your personal vendetta with Para. Why not put these efforts in rethinking what you are doing with kml template and microformats? Indeed, microformats get more and more interest, but HTML markup like microformats is definitely not Wiki style (it still can be and is hidden part of a template anyway)! So please answer yourself what is problematic about your proposed usage of microformats and kml in Wikipedia. -- Geonick 23:39, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

Bug

As noted on WP:TR#Bug?, this template currently fails to work on pages with brackets (parentheses) in page names; e.g. Splashdown (spacecraft landing); possibly caused by Para in this edit. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 11:07, 12 August 2007 (UTC)

Hmm. It was working when I added the KML template was added to the page, whatever date that was. I'm not bothering to check, as if it's broken now that's what is important. (SEWilco 04:32, 13 August 2007 (UTC))

Someone has fixed it. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 11:10, 13 August 2007 (UTC)

Labelling

Authors of parsing tools might consider using article titles, section headings, and table headings to generate KML files with data in labeled groups. In List of impact craters in the United States and Central America there could obviously be three groups used: "United States", "Central America", "Unconfirmed impact craters". This would be particularly useful with larger lists. (SEWilco 18:52, 13 August 2007 (UTC))

Thanks for the idea, that'll clarify the list of coordinates when they're taken out of context into a KML file. I modified the kmlexport tool to parse section headings into KML folders. --Para 18:52, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Another bug

From M42_motorway, which has coordinates with precision to 4 decimal places, Para's tool is producing KML with 5 decimal places, wrongly appending a zero (and thereby falsely implying such precision) to all values. Brian Suda's version, which Para replaced in this template, with one of his own making, is correctly using four DPs. I've restored the original, until we see when and if Para can fix this bug. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 10:10, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

A minor issue with appended zeros is hardly a reason to make thousands of coordinates inaccessible to users [3], as the Suda tool only supports microformats and is not Wikipedia specific. Anyhow, fixed. --Para 12:19, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

There is no "inaccessibility" involved, as KML is only used on pages with microformats. Far better to use an external tool which is giving valid information, than an internal one which is not. Though your comment reminds me - you ave still to properly answer my question, above. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 13:11, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Why would KML be for microformat pages only?? All coordinates on Wikipedia can be converted to KML and they have nothing to do with microformats. You may have created the template, but you do not control its use, and where anyone envisages or advocates this template to be used in is irrelevant. A link to a KML exporter can be seen useful with any article that has coordinates, and it is thus applicable to them all. Your edits are disruptive, as usual. --Para 13:30, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

"Why would KML be for microformat pages only??" Where did I say it would? You're making things up, again; and your ranting accusations are as false as usual. You've been warned, recently , over your incivility towards me. Kindly desist. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 14:21, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

The KML file format can be used with any Wikipedia page, but this template KML which we're discussing is only being used on some pages because it is only relevant to collections of coordinates. (SEWilco 15:12, 14 August 2007 (UTC))

Why would this template be relevant for collections of coordinates only? The KML format serves users just as well if it doesn't contain more than a single coordinate pair. It is currently not possible to have the annotated kmlexport functionality from the standard Wikipedia coordinate interface other than through this template. --Para 15:27, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

If KML (or other, such as GPX) export functionality is desired for single coordinate pairs, (aka single waypoints), then it should be added to {{GeoTemplate}}; as you should by now be aware, that's the page for single-waypoint services. I note that you have yet to answer my above, or earlier question on this page. Andy Mabbett | Talk to Andy Mabbett 16:18, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Single-point export through KML is in {{GeoTemplate}}. Look for "Find this location with Google Earth." (SEWilco 01:47, 15 August 2007 (UTC))

It is currently not possible to have the annotated kmlexport functionality from the standard Wikipedia coordinate interface other than through this template. --Para 08:18, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

OK. And this template is now working with the specified precision? Good. Bug resolved. (SEWilco 15:08, 15 August 2007 (UTC))

Yes, see my first comment to this topic and the concurrent reversion of Andy's edit. --Para 15:53, 15 August 2007 (UTC)

kml template considered harmful when used for polylines markup

From the examples the promotors of template kml gave so far - like motorways - I get more and more the understanding that many usages of Wiki articles with so called "multi coordinates" actually are meant as a ordered sequence of points, typically called a polyline in GIS. Please avoid using template kml for that purpose: It's name does'nt indicate this semantics at all, so it must be considered harmful. And it is superfluous anyway because any external webapplication and existing links like {{GeoTemplate}} already can parse an article and produce KML or any other geodata format. We must find a better way to encode polylines. -- Geonick 23:58, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

That should be "some examples", not "the examples". A polyline is a different type of item than a collection of related coordinates. (SEWilco 00:07, 21 August 2007 (UTC))

doc missing

Template:GeoGroupTemplate/doc is missing. Template should be documented. (SEWilco 16:33, 22 August 2007 (UTC))

Help me improve the export from a table of coordinates

I have recently created a List of aluminium smelters that gives the coordinates of over 100 inductrial plants. Today I added the {{kml}} template and this successfully exports the coordinates. Unfortunately the are labeled 1 .. 121. How do I do better? Ideally I would like to label each point and potentially link to WP articles. Qwerty310 00:18, 26 August 2007 (UTC) ... and now I have had a closer look at the example I have some ideas Qwerty310 00:22, 26 August 2007 (UTC)

Actually, just add |name=The Desired Label to the coord template calls. A fix has been proposed but is awaiting administrative editing over in {{coord}}. (SEWilco 04:03, 26 August 2007 (UTC))

Thanks for that. It pretty much works now, but as you can see from List of aluminium smelters the label for the first coord gets the wrong text. Qwerty310 10:53, 5 September 2007 (UTC)

only sometimes works

This working with Catagories could turn out to be really useful. I do not however understand why it works for some articles and not for others. I initially only though it worked for pages containing coord and not other methods such as values in Infoboxs. This is however not the case, see Category:Towns in Derbyshire as example. Most are using "infobox UK place", some show on map and some not. Can anyone explain why?Traveler100 17:00, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

With an article name the tool pulls the article from the live Wikipedia, but the more resource intensive category request uses the coordinates from Wikipedia-World, which is updated from the dumps. That project probably recognises the community approved coordinate entry methods only, and since the infoboxes in that category use other parameters for coordinates, the displayed articles are the ones that have a recognised coordinate template. --Para 17:17, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

It's amazing how well it works for categories! Not sure though why Schlatt-Haslen when loaded from Category:Municipalities of Appenzell Innerrhoden appears to be in Germany. -- User:Docu

Yep, the only problem is that it doesn't use live data. Wikipedia-World in Google Earth says that the coordinates for that article come from de:Schlatt-Haslen, but the coordinates there don't seem to be the ones we're seeing. This is something to bug de:User:Stefan Kühn and de:User:Kolossos about. What they probably should implement is a live update on request feature. --Para 22:56, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

The coordinates used seem to be the erroneous ones mentioned in that article (48° 16' N, 9° 24' O). -- User:Docu

I'm also a fan of using {{GeoGroupTemplate}} on category pages. However, unless I'm misunderstanding something on the Wikipedia-World project page, it appears that they haven't updated their data since 29 July 2007. That means any coordinates added or changed within the past five months do not appear when using this tool from a category page. -- Zyxw (talk) 08:38, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

That's right, unfortunately. If someone wants to help and parse a more recent dump from http://download.wikimedia.org/enwiki/, I could update the tool's database, but that will only help by a few months, as dumping the English Wikipedia database hasn't worked properly for a long time now. There's been some discussion of the problem on the wikitech-l mailing list. --Para (talk) 18:43, 29 December 2007 (UTC)

Neûchâtel category

The template worked quite well on most of the categories I applied it to. On Category:Municipalities of the canton of Neuchâtel, the link breaks due to the "â" in the category name. -- User:Docu

This is all because of Google's feature where parentheses have a special purpose and aren't allowed in kml file urls. Additionally spaces must be encoded as underscores. So with these rules the only way on MediaWiki side is to use FULLPAGENAMEE, which converts spaces to underscodes, urlencodes special characters, but leaves the parentheses intact. Because of this last part the template was modified to urlencode the name a second time, but that wasn't enough, so a third urlencode run was added. This is an ugly hack and I'm amazed it works at all. Turns out it doesn't.

Maybe someone can try to find a combination of encodings that might work with both Neuchâtel and Splashdown (spacecraft landing)? If we can't make that happen on the wiki side, the link in the template could be changed so that it first points to the toolserver with an initial parameter and the toolserver then redirects to Google Maps with the url encoded according to their wishes, but that would add unnecessary overhead for most articles. --Para 19:13, 26 September 2007 (UTC)

I think I found a workaround: Template:GeoGroupTemplate/Test. -- User:Docu

KML export 2007-09-28

KML export is nonresponsive. Wikipedia:Toolserver was down yesterday, is there still a problem? (SEWilco 19:36, 28 September 2007 (UTC))

The toolserver databases are generally unhappy at the moment, but that only affects links from categories. Links from articles should always work, unless of course if the whole toolserver or Wikipedia itself is down. --Para 20:08, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

KML export was failing a few minutes ago on List of National Historic Landmarks in Kansas and List of National Historic Landmarks in Minnesota. (SEWilco 20:15, 28 September 2007 (UTC))

Did CBDunkerson (talk · contribs) change to the old tool because of this mention? I can't find any article or coordinate format with problems. Is this reproducible? When it's failing, are you sure it's the tool and not Google? What do you get when you try to access the tool directly? What is the maximum latency both with Google and directly? --Para 14:31, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

I think the change of CBDunkerson should be reversed, especially since the old tool (suda.co.uk) fails with pages like Extreme points of Switzerland --- User:Docu

Did it need fixing? Above I said "was failing" because it was again working. The message was intended as information to Para as to the timeframe when failures were happening. Is there a discussion in some remote corner with other info about this template? (SEWilco 20:41, 30 September 2007 (UTC))

Use in {{Howtoreqphotoin}}

This template is transcluded with {{Howtoreqphotoin}}, which is a simple "how to". When used in Category pages (such as Category:California geography stubs or Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in Ohio) it somehow produces a usable google map and klm, even though there are no coordinates on the category pages. This use is not documented anywhere (I can't even figure out how it works there).

Could someone more knowledgeable explain this in the documentation. Or even fix the transclusion in in {{Howtoreqphotoin}} so that it only shows up on category pages. The template is automatically displayed on pages such as wikiprojects, where it produces zilch. It is also transcluded in talk pages tagged with {{WikiProject New Orleans}} for example (via the transclusion of Wikipedia:WikiProject New Orleans/to do, wich contains {{Howtoreqphotoin}}), with the same result, zero. This makes it difficult to follow "What links here", and is just poor implementation. Thank you. --Qyd 20:03, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Edit: {{GeoGroupTemplate}} only works on categories containing at least one article that is geo tagged. It does extract coordinates from the articles included in a category, and the displayed map only lists items corresponding to geo tagged articles. That's all great, it should be documented. --Qyd 20:17, 13 November 2007 (UTC)

Agreed, the template is useful only on pages that have coordinates on them, or on category pages. It's difficult to make the documentation easily understandable when people require inclusion of partially working tools, but perhaps my previous answers to this question would help someone trying to improve the documentation? Anyway, looks like there's need for a tool that links to GeoHack from a page that doesn't have any coordinates and isn't a category, or that's what the person who added this magic template to the howto seemed to be after. --Para 16:29, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

Compressed display option?

Hi. I'm working on numerous list-articles such as List of National Historic Landmarks in Kansas, where we want to include the template prominently, but recently the display size of the template has increased from showing just "Map of all coordinates" on one line, to showing "Map of all coordinates / Export points of interest as KML / Export microformated coordinates as GeoRSS / Map of microformated coordinates" on four lines. For our application, I don't think the readers want to know about those export options, and the expanded version looks bad. Is there a way to show a compressed display, back down on one line? doncram (talk) 08:15, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

It bothered me too. I restored the previous, collapsed version. For future, new versions, I'd suggest that a test version is done first. -- User:Docu

Thanks! doncram (talk) 16:37, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

Use on categories

Currently, it doesn't work on categories. The good news is that Kolossos is updating some of the extractions. -- User:Docu

Fixed. The database had disappeared from the server somehow. I'll update it again when new info is available. --Para (talk) 11:00, 13 April 2008 (UTC)

.:Great, thanks. -- User:Docu

Maximum number of places?

The template doesn't work properly on List of bridges on the National Register of Historic Places in Pennsylvania. Is this because there are too many places? --NE2 17:56, 4 May 2008 (UTC)

There are about 387 coordinates on that page. On google maps, I got a list of approx. 376 on the left side. Not all these are displayed simultaneously on the map, but when zooming on parts of the state, more and more are shown for that area. -- User:Docu

When I go to [4], the left side says "File not found at http://tools.wikimedia.de/~....". What URL did you use? --NE2 09:06, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

Wait a second... it just decided to work properly. Strange... --NE2 09:07, 6 May 2008 (UTC)

map of coords from category of talk pages

I have brought this up before but wondering if anyone has ideas for an alternative solution.

A number of photographers would like to address requests in the categories under Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in places. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Photography#Coordinates for Image/Photo requests. Is there any method, even running a program on request, that could create a map of the reqphoto talk pages based on co-ordinates on the article page? We would really like to address lists like this: Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in Germany or this : Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in Wales but difficult to find pages of places that are in your current location without spending a great deal of time clicking through links. Traveler100 (talk) 17:34, 23 May 2008 (UTC)

Already done. There is a delay before changes are shown. The following text on a Category page is from use of the template {{Howtoreqphotoin}} with the parameters |New York|New York}}. The GeoGroupTemplate is also shown in such a category by Howtoreqphotoin. -- SEWilco (talk) 05:40, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

For New York-related articles needing a photograph, use {{Image requested|in=New York}} in the talk page, which adds the article needing a photo to Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in New York. You can help Wikipedia by uploading freely licensed photographs for these articles to Wikimedia Commons.

The Free Image Search Tool may be able to locate suitable images on other web sites.

The Image Existence Checker shows articles in this list that have images.

This is great. I had tried it last week and got a blank page. I guess I should have checked again before making this post. Thank you very much. Traveler100 (talk) 07:05, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Broken (toolserver.org)?

It appears to be broken since the toolserver has a new URL. -- User:Docu

Actually, this is another problem. While the admins were doing various changes on the toolserver, they changed something™ that broke compression for all perl tools. I disabled compression while they fix whatever's broken, so the tool works again. --Para (talk) 13:23, 31 May 2008 (UTC)

Template seems not to be usable on other wikis

I tried to localize this template into turkish but the toolserver only understands english. That is the link created for use in GoogleMaps for turkish tr:Kategori:Türkiye'deki_göller does only work for english --katpatuka (talk) 04:05, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

GeoGroup Template on Category

I have made some use of this marvelous tag for lists (eg: 1 and 2) but I am moving on the try it for Category:Provincial Parks of British Columbia. I have gone through the A's and B's in that category to add the coord template to them but they aren't showing up yet in the maps. I gather that this waits for a data dump to happen when using the template for a category. Since it is getting on to 20 hours since I started and I don't know how often the dumps happen, I thought I would ask here if someone can tell if I am doing it correctly so that they will appear when the next dump happens before I slog on with editing a couple of hundred articles. Examples that I have done and would like to know if I have them right are at A, B and C. I understood from the template doc file that it worked with coord but not coor dms and the like. I also understood that a parm like |name=something| was needed for the label to show up in the map, yet when I ask the template to map the coordinates in Category:Provincial Parks of British Columbia, the ones there now which were there before I started this (eg X, Y and Z) don't use coord and don't have the name= parm (yet the names turn up in the resulting google map) so I am wondering if someone can tell me (rather than waiting for the next dump to see it for myself, whether the name= parm is needed or whether it will default to the article name? Great feature, thanks for doing it. --KenWalker | Talk 00:14, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

The first park, Adams, in the list does have a coord template so stuff should appear eventually on the map. And I see stuff on the map now. -- SEWilco (talk) 03:27, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

There are some, which were there before I started a couple of days ago but none of the new ones I am doing have turned up yet. Does anyone know if there is a way to tell how often google scans this sort of data? --KenWalker | Talk 18:47, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

The GeoGroup Template's map is produced by some sort of program running on a Wikipedia utility server. I don't know how often the updates take place. Google independently discovers the articles for their own products, but the maps from GeoGroup are from the utility server's scanning. -- SEWilco (talk) 04:17, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

I tried updating the documentation a bit, I hope it clarifies why the newly added data was visible in some cases and in some others was not. Please note that using the name parameter is not necessary if the article is to have only a single set of coordinates (is title coordinates a clear name for it?), since they will then be the coordinates for the article and will use its name. Also, looking at your contributions, it might be better to place the name parameter after the numbers as instructed in {{coord}}'s documentation. It displays fine on Wikipedia no matter where the text part is, but some external parsers may expect to get the coordinates in the beginning of the template the way it's documented. If you're following and think this is an important detail, please add it to the documentation as well. Help from the currently uninitiated editors would be most welcome everywhere related to instructions for use of coordinates on Wikipedia! --Para (talk) 12:22, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

Requested optional parameters

I am requesting (2) optional parameters to the template (to be passed on in the URL to KML export):

• article= (if specified - overriding FULLPAGENAMEE)
• namespace=

"article=" when specified would:

• override the default of FULLPAGENAMEE
• display as "Map of all coordinates for {article}"

Would be used in the odd / rare? case where a map of all coordinates needs to be placed on one page but actually needs to point to another page. For instance a "List of ..." article which does not contain coordinates itself, but an associated Category: does. By placing:

• {{GeoGroupTemplate|article=Category:lists category}}

on the "List of ..." article a map could be generated without needing to duplicate the coordinates on the list. Likewise if one wishes to point something out in a Talk: discussion without duplicating coordinates onto a Talk: page?

"namespace=" when specified would:

• be passed on in the URL to KML export in addition to the currently passed article= parameter
• be substituted on retrieved pagenames AFTER any category processing is done

For instance, a "typical" use could or might be to:

• place it on or point (article=) to a Category containing "requests", like "Wikipedia requested photographs in ..."
• it would display as "Map of all coordinates ... in {namespace}:"
• the URL passed to KML export would contain namespace=something&article=article_or_category_name
• If article= is a Category, then KML export would process the Category to retrive the list of pagenames
• In the case of requested photographs - the category actually contains Talk pages containing no coordinates,

but the corresponding articles usually do

• so the Talk: namespace would be replaced with the specified namespace= for each of the pagenames before retrieving the coordinates.

Specifying both would read:

• "Map of all coordinates for {article} in {namespace}:"
• URL would have namespace=something&article=article_or_category_name

It is important to note that in the namespace= case, there are actually (2) namespaces being passed:

• an old namespace as part of the article= (often Category:)
• a new namespace in the namespace= parameter (probably used to replace Talk: from a Category: with the normal article namespace in most cases)

Request(s) prompted by at least a couple of discussions:

• Category:Bays of Alaska
• User_talk:Doncram#GeoGroupTemplate

LeheckaG (talk) 14:57, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

Polar co-ordinates

This template is used on List of research stations in Antarctica, Extreme points of the Antarctic and Extreme points of the Arctic. For obvious reasons, distances are horribly distorted in the polar regions when viewing such areas. Is it possible to link to map services that do a polar projection? Are such services available? Carcharoth (talk) 02:49, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

I researched it a little, the current GeoGroupTemplate generates either a Google .KML (Keyhole Markup Language) file or a GeoRSS file format. Yes, obviously Google Map's projection does not work well at the poles, and getting Google Maps (or other service) to switch their map projections at the poles would be challeging. Most other Antarctica maps appear to be polar projections with Longitude 0 facing up, 180 facing down, 90 East to the right, and 90 West to the left. There might be an online/public-domain source for Antartica polar maps, but I am not aware of one other that the USGS LIMA. So to create a map service:

• public domain Antarctica imagery is required, like: Landsat Image Mosaic Of Antarctica
• In the imagery, the pixel coordinates of Latitude 90S (the Pole) need to be determined
• for alignment/registration purposes, landmarks near the corners or edges need both their geographic and pixel coordinates determined
• a formula to transform geographic (latitude,longitude) coordinates to (polar) pixel coordinates needs to be applied for each point to be mapped

If you point me to which Antarctica map image on Commons: or the English Wikipedia you want to use as a backdrop, I can create Antarctica-customized (polar) versions of Location map+ and Location map~ which plot multiple marks on a (polar) background map. It would not be as fancy as Google Maps, but it would allow display of multiple marks on one Antarctica (polar) background map. The customization would be some formulas to get latitude,longitude coordinates to line up with the map image. LeheckaG (talk) 16:19, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Not sure what sort of map images would be best. For the Arctic, I like Image:Arctic big.svg - which is a labelled map. For the Antarctic, we have Image:Antarctica 6400px from Blue Marble.jpg, which is an unlabelled satellite picture. We also have Image:Arctica surface.jpg, a satellite picture of the Arctic. Do any of those fit what you had in mind? Carcharoth (talk) 23:42, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Letting you know I received your post above, I "roughed in" a set of "polar" templates. The map images you cited above probably require some modification: they are generally "not square" (i.e. height and width are different), but more importantly I am guessing that their centers are not EXACTLY at the corresponding poles. Either issue can be resolved by some (transparent) padding and/or trimming of the map image files. The polar images are good enough "as is" to develop all the "polar" templates, and then go back and update the background map images later. I worked through several overlay-alignment issues, and I have at least (2) more issues which I know about (at the current time) to work through for the templates to be generally useful. I am currently working on some alignment/registration (a.k.a. "centering") issues when various-sized (non-square) map images are used, after that issue is resolved, then I need to finish working on the coordinate transformations. I have the "last" part of the coordinate transformations done (adjusting 0-100% to compensate for the map-marker size relative to the map height and width), the piece I need to debug is transforming latitude,longitude to <div style="position: absolute; top: {0-100}%; left: {0-100}%;"> overlays on a polar map, given either the (latitude,longitude) of the corners or the (latitude) coordinates of the center of the edges. Since the polar maps should be "symmetrical" and centered on a pole, either (latitude,longitude) for (1) corner or (latitude) of (1) horizontal and (1) horizontal edge should be sufficient. Wiki does not have much in the way of mathematical calculations beyond the limited {{#expr:}} parser functions without adding an extension, but I believe there is enough there to approximate polar (trigonometric) functions with enough (2 to 4 significant digits) precision to approximate locations on a map. LeheckaG (talk) 21:03, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

What needs to be done now? Shall we continue discussion here or move somewhere else? Carcharoth (talk) 02:01, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

I got "distracted" by some other Wiki issues ... still working on the Polar templates, when I had looked at Special:Version it seemed to indicate that the extended math trig. functions are not installed, but I went ahead and tried them last night, and they apparently are? latitude and longitude are converted to top: and left: map coordinates by r * cos( angle ) and r * sin( angle ) where (for the North pole) angle = ( longitude ) and r = ( 90 - latitude ), the South pole can use either the same or a different formula (the "before-after/North-South issues" which I am working out below). I am working through the various alignment, orientation, and scaling issues. So far the "frustrating part" has been to get it roughly aligned and then trying to make sure it has the same functionality (parameters) as Location map which usually throws it out of alignment again. Location map has different alignment and scale issues from a polar map, so the former is aligned by "fudging" the top and bottom latitude and left and right longitude parameters on the "State" templates. Whereas for polar maps. The one fundamental polar map "requirement" is that the image map file's horizontal and vertical center really be at the corresponding pole, then the two parameters to properly scale things are the latitude of the center of either vertical edge and the latitude of either horizontal edge (because of centering and symmetry), or I suppose the latitude and longitude of any 1 of the 4 corners could be used instead.

Currently, I am "taking a break from working on aiignment" and I roughed in what is needed for the coordinate transformations and I am evaluating before-after/North-South "trade-offs". HTML/XML's left: %; matches the "normal" behavior of a Cartesian x-axis from left to right, but top: %; is flipped from how a "normal" Cartesian y-axis is oriented. For the map images, the Arctic has longitude 0 pointing down, whereas the Antarctic has longitude 0 pointing up. To re-orient things, either the initial Longitude can be adjusted a 1/4 or 3/4 turn (90 degrees or Pi/2 and 270 degrees or 3Pi/2) in either direction (depending on whether North or South pole), or it can be left "as is" and the (x,y) result can be fed into top: left: differently (switching which x,y is associated with which top,left and/or switching +/- signs. Currently, I am working through which adjustment-where is "cleaner" (i.e. adjust before or adjust after, taking North versus South into account). I am striving for one set of formulas which work for both North and South rather than having different logic for each hemisphere/pole (the Location map templates have "too much" conditional logic in them which I would prefer not to have in the Polar map templates). LeheckaG (talk) 02:55, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

I have them roughed in, at this point still "tweaking" some things. See Template:Polar map~/doc. They require azimuthal map projections centered at the corresponding poles, with lines of latitude evenly spaced. Is the requirement that the pole be in the exact center of the map image a reasonable requirement? I can probably figure out a way to allow for alternate map centers, but (to me) poles at the map image center seems like a reasonable requirement? They will work with rectangular map images in addition to square map images. I did most of the recent work on Polar map+ and Polar map~, so at this point, the "tweaking" is reconciling their parameters so they are as similar as possible to the previous Location map templates, and re-visiting the base Polar map * templates to better align the map edge coordinates. If you have a list of visually identifiable Arctic or Antarctica coordinates, that would help align the edges (edges are aligned by entering the latitude of the center of the left and top edges in the corresponding Polar Map Arctic, Polar Map Arctica, and Polar Map Antarctica templates (the left and top fields). The "Arctic" .svg image needs to be either vertically trimmed on the top or padded on the bottom so that North pole is shifted down to the correct center spot. LeheckaG (talk) 16:17, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Obviously it needs more work, but I'm extremely impressed so far. As you say, the Arctic one needs tweaking. The background (dark blue sea) on the Antarctic one is not ideal, either, as the co-ords are difficult to read. One thought I had - this could be copied over to polar star maps as well, though I suspect something might have already been done for that. As far as visual identification goes, just grab co-ords for any of the places labelled in Image:Arctic big.svg, and see if things are lining up. For the South Pole, I'm not so sure, but the South Pole looks to be in the right place. I'm really impressed by this, as I said, but may not have much time over the next few days and weeks - please nudge me or someone else if you need any help. I'm actually rather excited that we might actually be getting working polar maps! :-) Carcharoth (talk) 04:01, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

One might want to add a map directly onto Template:GeoTemplate. I tried to do this by adding the new template, but this didn't work [5]. The map would need to be on the template directly, similar to the minimap. -- User:Docu

Request for recursive grab of category tree to specified depth

I would like to add the template to Category:Municipalities of Norway, however with its present functionalty this serves no purpose since all articles are categorized in subcategories. Therefore I propose that the functionality of the template is expanded so that recursive category trees can be included. For this to be practicable I propose a parameter to set the depth to which the recursive grab is performed (see how this is done for the <categorytree> extension). As a safeguard against abuse or ill-judged applications, a maximum number of items could be added to the template (if such isn't already inherent in procedure).__meco (talk) 08:51, 23 August 2008 (UTC)

This has been requested so many times that I decided to take the time and implement the feature. The tool used in this template can now map Category:Municipalities of Norway (link leads to Google Maps). The tool still needs more work and testing, and the template may need modifications if a category depth parameter is needed. Currently recursion is unlimited (l=0), and we'll need to see how deep category trees this template is being used in and if the toolserver can handle such a load. If it can't, we'd need to find a way for configuring the limit in a flexible way so that people who know about this template wouldn't have to go around updating depth numbers whenever users expand categories. I'll probably also need to make the tool prune visited but empty categories from the tree, which would simplify some category trees where all branches aren't related to a location and so don't have coordinates.

Anyway, recursion brings us to another problem that has been a problem at peak times already: run time. Google Maps has quite short timeouts for external kml requests, and sometimes their service doesn't show anything when the kmlexport tool runs the query a few seconds longer than usually. I solved this with preprocessing:

Currently we have:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://toolserver.org/~para/cgi-bin/kmlexport?article=Category:Lakes_of_Portugal

The new barely implemented limit parameter makes the query recursive:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://toolserver.org/~para/cgi-bin/kmlexport?article=Category:Lakes_of_Portugal%26l%3D0

If the query takes too long, Google may not show any results. The following link first runs the query and then redirects to Google for the results, like the Norway one did above:

http://toolserver.org/~para/cgi-bin/kmlexport?article=Category:Lakes_of_Portugal&l=0&redir=google

This preprocessing method would only have to be used with Google, as normal clients don't time out that quickly, not even Google Earth. But like with defining a recursion limit, there's the problem of configuring when the option should be used. It could be the default, but that'd make the urls less pretty. Thoughts and test results would be welcome. --Para (talk) 22:43, 28 August 2008 (UTC)

I commend you on the work that you have done so far. Now, Category:Municipalities of Norway shows also why category depth is needed as you will notice that subcategories to the municipalities provide all sorts of coordinates, i.e. metro stations, companies and buildings. __meco (talk) 07:20, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

 Done. Compare no recursion with 1st level, 2nd level and 3rd level. The problem with limiting recursion is that the branches aren't always divided the same way. For example, the municipality of Oslo is in the municipalities category, but it contains landmarks and such of the city of Oslo as well, which the other municipality categories do not. To really make recursion work correctly on a conceptual level, we would need information in all subcategories on where the scope of each of their parent categories ends. That would be quite a job however and wouldn't be visible in the database, so something like that would need a bit of MediaWiki modifications. I suppose for now the only option is to allow category editors to give a hard limit appropriate for that particular tree branch through this template... --Para (talk) 09:41, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

The 1st level alternative (which is what we're looking for in this instance) appears to respond erratically, possibly related to Google performance. sometimes, not all parts of the country are covered, or some parts only get an erroneously low count of flags. __meco (talk) 10:31, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

The tool returns all the contents of the category, but Google Maps does indeed have some browser performance related limitations on how much it displays. With the hundreds of placemarks from that category, Google shows "Some content has been hidden, Zoom to see more" at the top of the list, which will disappear if you massage the zoom control a bit. That part is all up to Google's Javascript and other mysterious structures we can't affect. --Para (talk) 14:36, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

Should I just copy the URL above and modify it for various categories, or is this going to be included in a template (the present one for example)? __meco (talk) 20:49, 29 August 2008 (UTC)

No Geo Points found?

When I click the "Export microformated coordinates as GeoRSS" at List of Registered Historic Places in Contra Costa County, California, it returns "No Geo Points found". I know I've done this before with other Registered Historic Places lists. The "Export points of interest as KML" link works, but when I use it, it doesn't retain the name labels for each location when I import the coordinates into Google Maps. Any guidance is appreciated. --Sanfranman59 (talk) 19:00, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

The former works fine, for me. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 20:49, 5 October 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm ... do you mean that when you click on "Export microformated coordinates as GeoRSS" on that page, it pops up a window to save a file to your computer? I'm still getting "No Geo Points found". "Map of all coordinates", "Export points of interest as KML" & "Map of microformated coordinates" all work as expected. I've tried clearing my internet cache and cookies. I tried it using both Firefox and Internet Explorer for my browser. I've tried turning my computer off and back on. Same thing. Anyone else having this problem? --Sanfranman59 (talk) 19:25, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, no. I misread your original comment, I see the same as you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 19:40, 6 October 2008 (UTC)

Title display

Could somebody with the technical know-how (which I lack) please create a sandbox version of this template, with an optional |display=title switch, which will display a second copy of the "map of all coordinates" link, in the space usually occupied by an article's single set of coordinates. I want to test and obtain consensus for using the template in this way for long, narrow features (such as roads or rivers) where a single set of coordinates is not appropriate, per discussion at WT:LINEAR (please discuss the wider issues there). Once that's done, I'll speak to my contacts at Google to advise them that they can map such articles in Google Maps and Google Earth. Thank you. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:30, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

This should not be done. A link with no information about the topic of the article in the link text does not belong next to the title. See Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Linear#An alternative to .22main.22 coordinates. --Para (talk) 09:51, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Having yet another thing in the title area has always been contested, and would only spark more controversy. And could you explain why a titled position of the link would help with Google mapping? Thanks. --Qyd (talk) 13:14, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

[reply to both] I'm not proposing "another" thing in the title area; I'm proposing a different version of the same thing; and I'm asking for a prototype, so that people can see and debate the proposed change. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 14:04, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

Exactly, and I oppose the addition of such a thing in the title area, without needing to see what it would look like. You can try demonstrating this idea to others with an edited screenshot for example. --Para (talk) 16:59, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

It's clear that you oppose it without seeing it; but you also seem to oppose the production of a sandbox demonstrator to allow others to see it; and to facilitate wider, informed debate. There is parallel discussion at WT:LINEAR; per the request in my original post in this section, let's please centralise discussion there, for the convenience of others. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 17:30, 17 October 2008 (UTC)

url failure in google maps

When I click the option to show the map it ends in Google maps with an error on toolserver.org, but if I change it to tools.wikimedia.de it works. The error says "File not found at http://toolserver.wikipedia" from [6]

stuffs up,

but [7] worked Graeme Bartlett (talk) 11:15, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

The problem is with long pages and big categories, where the processing can sometimes take a while. That combined with Google Maps waiting for tools to deliver the content for a very short time only, and them caching all results for some minutes, even those timeouts, we end up with these mysterious error messages. The hostname used isn't relevant (unless it's a non-existant toolserver.wikipedia.org instead of toolserver.org), one just happened to work a few seconds quicker that first time it was requested.

The undocumented http://toolserver.org/~para/cgi-bin/kmlexport?article=List_of_cities,_towns_and_villages_in_Friesland,_A-L&redir=google works by first preparing the list and then redirecting to Google Maps for viewing it. I have been thinking of making that pre-cache functionality the default in the tool, but then people working with coordinates would be confused why current content isn't being shown. Parserfunctions don't have enough information for the size of pages and categories, so maybe we'll just have to make a "big" parameter in the template, to be used on problematic pages? --Para (talk) 11:58, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Usage of geogroup template on one page, listing on separate page

The North Sea article is very long. A listing of points was made at a separate article Geography of the North Sea. Now can the geo group template be plopped onto the North Sea article using the listing at the Geography of the North Sea article so the annotated map shows up for the North Sea article as well as the Geography of the North Sea article? Kind REgards. SriMesh | talk 03:37, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

LeheckaG suggested this a while ago at #Requested optional parameters, but it must have been overlooked. The template can't do that at the moment, but the required modification to make it possible shouldn't be difficult. Perhaps {{urlencode:{{{article|{{FULLPAGENAME}}}}}}} would work for the tool links where it now says {{FULLPAGENAMEE}}, and something similar for the link text, so that the template could be used like {{GeoGroupTemplate|article=Geography of the North Sea}}? Alternatively, you could just subst the current template and edit the resulting links, but that's not very pretty... --Para (talk) 00:59, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

 Done. Hope it works, Google's double urlencoding is always confusing. --Para (talk) 15:05, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I have now added the awesome new geogroup template map to North Sea!!!!SriMesh | talk 04:40, 7 December 2008 (UTC)

Manifesto on geogrouptemplate

I noticed that the geogrouptemplate had been modified to display a manifesto and undid that change, but its still displayed. Anyone else seeing this? dm (talk) 03:06, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

What am I doing wrong

The map created from List of eponymous roads in London has numbers for all but two of the coords rendered on the map. I'm somewhat stumped. Would someone advise where I went wrong. thanks--Tagishsimon (talk) 01:16, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

At the moment I see three coords on that page with a Name parameter instead of name, and since template parameter names are case sensitive, they don't show up. Another part of what you saw is because Google caches the data it retrieves for some minutes. You must have looked at the Google view before doing the edits, then quickly putting them through and on checking again, got the same cached view as before, with the original two named coords. This is probably a common scenario, though I don't know how long on average it takes people to enter the names and how long Google caches things. Rapid refreshing may possibly even extend their cache period. Perhaps a timestamp should be added to the top of the list (the only place possible), or would the use of UTC confuse people who have localised the times Wikipedia shows? --Para (talk) 09:25, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I've amended the three Names. Not sure if that was it or if it was a cache problem (my actions were as you surmised - look, edit, look, &c.), as you suggest, but today it all works. Excellent. --Tagishsimon (talk) 09:44, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

What I may suggest is you add the following string to your Google Maps query: "&refresh=" followed by a random number. This will bypass Google's cache. --  Denelson83  17:36, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Usage help, or maybe an enhancement request

A couple of months ago, I saw the kml template added to Nanboku Line (Sendai). After reading about the template today (I guess I'm a slow reader?), I noticed it could be used on categories. So, after I added it to Category:Sendai City Subway Line an annoying problem surfaced: since the coords are included in a table in the main article, and again in each individual station article, the map reference comes up with two sets of coords for each station. So, is there a better way to use the template that prevents this? Or, would it be possible to add some sort of markup like {{kml-category-off}} for articles like Nanboku Line (Sendai) so that when the category is parsed, those coords are skipped? Or, another approach might be a parameter inside the template on the category page which lists pages that are to be ignored when scanning the cat? Thanks! Neier (talk) 12:17, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I've changed that to use {{GeoGroupTemplate|article=Nanboku Line (Sendai)}}. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 12:29, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm. I guess that will work for now; but, things would get messy once there is more than one "index" articles in each category. And, it sorta defeats the whole purpose of having the category be recursively monitored if only a single article is relied on. Neier (talk) 09:14, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

You are actually pointing to a much deeper issue here: Do we want redundant geocoding with data from individual articles being duplicated in list articles? This has been giving me a headache for a while now. Glad you brought it up. --Dschwen 21:15, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that's why I was hoping there was an "ignore" parameter as it would avert a long discussion. :-)

I can see points for and against. For lists with many missing articles, it is nice. For lists which are contained in a category, it is redundant and harder to maintain; and, if I was writing a bot to parse the codes, having multiple (and, likely different) coordinates for the same place would cause many headaches. I guess I'm mostly on the side that they aren't needed in lists; but, I'm not real involved with the geo tag projects, so, take that advice with a large grain of salt. Neier (talk) 13:17, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Point out of Place

The Map of All Coordinates link this template produces at the bottom of the table in the Vancouver Island Ranges article works nicely except that it produces one spurious location for Golden Hinde (mountain) off in China somewhere rather than on Vancouver Island. I have hunted through the code and can't figure out why. Could someone have a look? It is probably one of those things another set of eyes will pick out right away. --KenWalker | Talk 21:21, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Seems fine now. Oosoom ^Talk 09:45, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Problem with multiple tables

I'm using the French version of this Template. When an article has its coordonates all in one table, the template works fine. However, when there is two or more tables with coordonates, Google gives "errors in data" fomr kmltool. Any idea of the cause and how to make the call to kmltool work on multiple table articles ? Pierre cb (talk) 20:07, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

It's actually not about multiple tables. With fr:Liste de tripoints Google Maps was having trouble with the é in the Amérique heading. It was sent as U+00E9 and Google refused to parse the data, but when sent as U+C3A9, it works. According to UTF-8#Description, only the 7-bit ASCII printable characters are allowed when content-type is said to be UTF8, and everything else needs to be in the longer format. Google is not enforcing that very well though, as they require ASCII encoding for document titles even when the entire document is supposed to be in UTF8. Oh well, the output should be to their liking now. --Para (talk) 21:49, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the info but how do you force the ASCII table in an article ? 70.52.11.52 (talk) 00:23, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, Wikipedia transfers all its content in UTF8, so as long as the text in an article looks fine in your browser, you don't need to worry about encoding. The kmlexport tool however needs to do some conversion to provide the data to Google and things can go wrong sometimes, so please report any further problems here. --Para (talk) 01:03, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

If quite frustating in fact. klmexport works on some article and other are refused (like fr:Liste des volcans d'Afrique) for no apparent reason in the coding. Only the multiple tables seemed the common denominator but you ahve proved that iti is not. Is there a utility program to check the ASCII interpretation problem that diagnose and correct the files sent to Google ? Pierre cb (talk) 01:24, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Ah, that's again another issue the people editing this template had some trouble with in the beginning, and in that case you do have to delve into encoding, though this time not in ASCII but nested urlencoding. On the French Wikipedia the article parameter in the link is currently article%3DListe%2Bdes%2Bvolcans%2Bd%2526%252339%253BAfrique. If you go to the English Wikipedia page of the same name and preview {{GeoGroupTemplate}} there, the parameter is article%3DListe_des_volcans_d%252527Afrique. It was indeed incredibly frustrating to get it right, and the only advice I can give you is to duplicate the encoding from this template. Maybe allowing Google to show "file not found" is not the best error message to relay Wikipedia's 404 Not Found message though... --Para (talk) 01:54, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Coordinate duplicated

If {{Coord}} is used with "|display=inline,title" to delineate the primary article coordinate (e.g. The Lone Sailor), then kmlexport produces two copies of the coordinate. I'm aware there is some debate about Coord displaying two places, however I don't think anyone would debate kmlexport only including it once. I suppose if kmlexport is just scraping the geo microformats, then it is really Coord that needs fixing to emit only one. However I'll start asking here. --J Clear (talk) 00:17, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

So much information in duplicated in Wikipedia articles, for summary style, ease of access, consistency, etc. In most cases it probably doesn't matter to a normal reader if an article has duplicate coordinates. I however can't think of a situation where the duplicates would be interesting in an exported list of coordinates, except maybe when the duplicates are in different sections, grouped differently or something. I modified the tool to remove duplicates within sections. So far that's only exact duplicates, and there are probably articles which give the same coordinates in different formats that the tool won't prune. I don't know if it's possible to detect that from cases where an article mentions things very very close to each other. --Para (talk) 01:09, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

It looks like you covered the case I was concerned with, thanks. Although if my surmise is right, you're covering for a bug elsewhere. And yeah, I just edited Marietta, Ohio to prune three different Coord entries for the town down to the infobox one. --J Clear (talk) 04:06, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Good good, WP:USCITY#Geography has already been updated to no longer encourage all that redundancy typical to US articles. The effects of the previous guideline will probably continue to be visible for quite a while, for example in one of the categories that article is in, United States colonial and territorial capitals.

Removing the duplicate markup from the Coord template might be difficult without redesigning the template structure, as the inline,title bit just does a double transclusion of the template where the additional spans and classes are added. But that's not a problem here as the kmlexport tool doesn't parse microformats. --Para (talk) 14:10, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

GeoRSS

I've seen there is a section above about getting no data with the option GeoRSS. Is there any correction to that problem in the future as I get this response too ?Pierre cb (talk) 22:28, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

The format doesn't seem to have had much interest, but reading up on it, it would allow showing Wikipedia data in Microsoft Live Maps and Yahoo Maps. To replace the broken Suda tool, Microsoft has an online KML to GeoRSS converter, which can give GeoRSS of fr:Liste de tripoints, or even a Live Search Maps view of fr:Liste de tripoints. This might be worth adding to the various templates, as aerial imagery from Live Maps is often better than that from Google. --Para (talk) 01:07, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I think I will add the second one. Pierre cb (talk) 04:23, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Me too, the bird's eye imagery in urban areas and easy navigation between the points is possibly the coolest option ever! (No I don't work for them :)) --Para (talk) 11:09, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Expansion of nested geographical information

I notice that the kmlexport script already handles nested categories, is there a way to add the nesting level to this template, so that Category:Castles in England could show all the positions of the castles in its county subcategories. Discretion would be needed to avoid huge data volumes. Vicarage (talk) 06:29, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm interested in this as well. See Categories_and_geo_coordinates 118.208.97.169 (talk) 20:07, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Why only these two geo services? Why not others too?

• Mapquest?
• maps.yahoo.com?

etc? CaribDigita (talk) 17:12, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

The current versions of those sites and their APIs require someone to set up a "map holder" page somewhere, possibly personally register with the provider to be able to use maps on the page, maintain the page, and then have people use that page for their mapping needs instead of the provider's own site. It's been a bit much for anyone interested so far, but maybe there's some Wikipedian somewhere who doesn't mind doing it? Like Google and Live Search, Yahoo seems to have a similar way in their "no programming" V1 API to visualise remote collections by URL, but I can't see it working with any example on the net (all of which are from 2005!) other than Yahoo's own. So not high expectations there, and even if it worked, Yahoo fans probably don't much like the V1 interface anymore. --Para (talk) 18:07, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Long-list-warning option needed

There are numerous list-articles of historic sites listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places which have more than 200 coordinates. I understand that the LiveSearch / Bing maps don't display more than 200, just cutting off what is displayed with no notice. I wonder about a partial remedy being an option for this GeoGroupTemplate to display a warning message regarding that. Perhaps display "Bing map displays just first 200 coordinates". The Bing maps at least appear reliably, generated on the fly. The Google maps for large lists do not appear reliably. I know that if you click on the Google map link for a large list it will often show a message like "map not available", but if you come back a few times and try again hours later, often the map will then work. Some comment about this would be helpful too. If/when the Bing or Google map systems capabilities change, then the long-list-warning message could be changed here, centrally. I don't anticipate there is any way for the long-list-warning to be displayed automatically only for articles having more than 200 coordinates, is there? A manually set warning, to be called by something like {{GeoGroupTemplate|long-list-warning=yes}} would be easy to set up, I think. Could that be done, please? doncram (talk) 18:24, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Further, actually what GeoGroupTemplate displays is "Map of all coordinates from Google / Map of all coordinates from Bing". This is a false promise in cases where there are more than 200 coordinates, as they are not all displayed by Bing. doncram (talk) 18:28, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

One example in mainspace of an article where Bing map displays, but fails to note that it has cut off at 200 places, is National Register of Historic Places listings in Detroit, Michigan. I'm working on another big list, not yet in mainspace, at Wikipedia:WikiProject World Heritage Sites/Tables of WHS Sites EUR region. Is there any possibility of this long-list-warning feature being implemented? Does anyone else see a need here? doncram (talk) 17:37, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

If the links in the template are changed to the redirect format (→toolserver→query→map instead of the current →map→toolserver→query→map), it would be possible to implement an automatic warning in the tool, shown for some seconds or requiring acknowledgment. It would also get rid of the "map not available" problem, which happens when the map service thinks the tool takes too long to respond. Another perhaps dirtier way would be to add the message in the kml data some way, in the description maybe if that's displayed by the services, and only show it when it's called by one of the supported services and the placemarks exceed the limit of the service. I think coding such warnings in Wikipedia articles would be very ugly, unless done on-view with Javascript. Actually, since all the services require Javascript for showing placemarks anyway, a script on Wikipedia could replace this template entirely and do all the above... --Para (talk) 17:51, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Parameters and looking pretty

I hate myself for doing this post as it is against all my principles to comment on formatting- but It probably should be addressed. It should be for the user to decide the format of the box.

Maps of all the points used in this article
Google	Bing

Maps of all the points used in this article

Google

Bing

Location of all the features

Google

Bing

I can think of situations where I would want to include the link, in navbox format, from within an info box, in the external links with commons cat. Shade should be selectable to fit in with the colour scheme of the controlling Wikiproject Or to allow the user to set the css in monobook. Maybe we need to provide the following parameters

• text
• width
• rows
• tablestylestring

Or there again I may be wrong. --ClemRutter (talk) 21:00, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

As colors are likely to be large topic to discussion, I'd rather use one of the standard interface colors. The usual placement of the template is with the sister links at the bottom of an article or on category pages. In a few cases, it's also used at the beginning of an article. For articles, some of the links can also be reached from the map sources pages, but it isn't easy to find. BTW there are more than two links included in the template. -- User:Docu 11:09, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Colors

Is there a way to have multiple colors on the map, if for example I want to differenciate 2 lists of points on a single page? Maybe adding a color parameter to Coord?

Gonioul (talk) 12:38, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Possibly... But we have to remember that coordinates are used in many applications, and so far all the information given in the coordinate templates has been about the location only. I don't think mixing in information about their context would be good, especially as there can be more than one. If the template and tool supported it, fixing coord with a colour or an icon might confuse people when they view the data from another starting point than the article author intended.

Icons have been used on some wiki related maps so far: Wikipedia-World uses category based (I think) icons on Google Earth, and the kmlexport tool on one of the Norwegian Wikipedias is linked to an object type when this template is applied: see cities, mountains or churches.

What might work, is assigning each coord to a group, and then defining the style of the group somewhere, like is done with CSS. Or if sections are enough for the grouping, just have some invisible template in the section define the style. Then it would be clear that the information applies to that group or section only, and something that uses data from multiple articles wouldn't have to pay attention to it.

In the end though, the kml will have to contain the url of an icon, as the icon color property in kml is only supported by Google Earth. But it might still be implemented in the style definition as a colour, which then affects the actual icon depending on the map service used (as most of them have icons in different style). The problem is that in any case it will have to specifically set the icon and the user then has no way to return to the default icon of the service. That can be a problem with, say, a volcano icon that's very different from the default.

Anyway, up to the community to find how such a thing would be done on the wiki side. --Para (talk) 17:03, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Lists

There are a number of lists whose members have geograpic coordinates. For example:

• List of National Trust properties in England
• List of schools in Lincolnshire

I really like the way that this template reacts with categories, parsing the members for coordinates.

Would it be possible to do the same thing with lists?--Brunnian (talk) 22:32, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

The tool used by this template can handle this case, see map of articles linked from "List of National Trust properties in England" or map of articles linked from "List of schools in Lincolnshire". The template would need to be adapted, somehow. --Para (talk) 09:44, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

I've used those on those two links. Thanks. The problem is that two of the links on the second one are not to schools, but to 'Lincolnshire' and 'England' (london). This spoils the impact a bit. Does the tool include an 'exclude' option?--Brunnian (talk) 11:09, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

A better approach might be to convert those lists tp tables, with columns for coordinates, plus images, locality, etc. Otherwise they're redundant to categories. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 12:05, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

other mapping formats

I've been adding the kml template to various county pages from List of abbeys and priories in England - Cornwall, Devon, so far so good. But when I get to List of monastic houses in Somerset I'm stumped - the previous editor has used OSGB map references, with gbmapping template and others have used oscoor - is it possible to use them with the kml technique? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Brunnian (talk • contribs) 22:38, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

No, it needs to use {{Coord}}, with WGS84 coordinates. Coord's documentation explains what to do. Thank you for adding this template to other articles. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:28, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Problems with geo-coded images on Commons

(I'm posting this here as I suspect there'll be more users with the required expertise here than on Commons). I'm currently going through my images on Commons, tagging them with {{Location dec}}. These display ok in Google Maps when I click on the file link (e.g. [8]), however when I try to use the GeoGroupTemplate on Commons for these images, only those images which do not have a heading show up ([9]). They are all listed in the left hand panel, but most do not have an icon on the map. Is the problem a) with the way I'm tagging them, b) with the Location dec template, c) with the GeoGroupTemplate, or d) with Google? Any help or advice would be appreciated. —  Tivedshambo  (t/c) 17:59, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

First option should have been to blame one of the tools when they give different results with the same data. The bug seems to have been introduced to numeric headings when I was working on commons:Commons talk:Geocoding#Category maps couple of days ago. Fixed now, thanks for noticing. --Para (talk) 19:45, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Great - thanks. —  Tivedshambo  (t/c) 22:51, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

other language categories

Seems like kmlexport doesn't work with french wiki categories, I don't know for other wikis...

Please check fr:Catégorie:Zone 1 des transports en commun d'Île-de-France

Gonioul (talk) 22:22, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

I fixed some ascii vs utf8 confusion and it should work now. --Para (talk) 08:04, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! - Gonioul (talk) 08:56, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

A user script to generate a map tab for every page

After realising how long it might take to add the template to every category I'm interested in, I wondered if I could automatically add the functionality to every page using a user script. And indeed if you modify your monobook.js file (as described in Wikipedia:WikiProject_User_scripts/Scripts) to have

importScript('User:Vicarage/maptab.js');

You should get a 'map' tab at the top of the page that uses the toolserver approach to generate a Google Map on the fly. I'm not a Javascript or Wikipedia internals expert, so I expect the approach is not bulletproof, but I'd be interested in people's comments. Vicarage (talk) 19:15, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

kml template

At "Category:California ranchos" the template:kml for Bing only lists/maps the first 200 entries (Google maps all). I note that there are only 200 entries on the 1st page of "Category:California ranchos". Emargie (talk) 06:17, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Category

Category:Geographic coordinate lists state: These articles have lists of places identified by their latitude and longitude. They include the {{GeoGroupTemplate}}, to allow these places to be shown on a map., but this template do not add Category:Geographic coordinate lists to the articles that use the template. Is there a specific reason for that or can I add Category:Geographic coordinate lists to the template code? --NJR_ZA (talk) 18:05, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

openstreetmap

Is it possible to add this case to the redir option?

Gonioul (talk) 23:40, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Sure, but where should it redirect? I don't think there's any official OSM site that has KML fetching functionality. OpenStreetMap:KML has a few examples to some odd sites, but it would probably be best for Wikipedia use if the meta:OpenStreetMap people working on the toolserver could set one up. --Para (talk) 08:05, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Linking to Google Maps

I have used geocoding like this:

{{coord|26|47|24|N|86|49|0|E|type:landmark_scale:250000|name=Kamala Valley}}

But it makes readers jump through too many hoops before they actually see a map. Check it out: 26°47′24″N 86°49′0″E)

I want something more immediate where they can simply click on a link and see a map I've set up. This template is a start:

{{Google maps | url = http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=<lat,lon>&z=<nn>&q=<lat,lon>+(<marker+label>)| accessdate = <yyyy-mm-dd> | title = <title for link>}}

Here's a sample: "Dang and Deukhuri valleys" (Map). Google Maps. Retrieved 2020-05-07.

Unfortunately this template only seems to support one marker per map. Sometimes I want multiple markers.

This webpage at Google.com explains how to have multiple markers. Great! So I started sandboxing around.

Their sample URL: http://maps.google.com/maps/api/staticmap?center=Brooklyn+Bridge,New+York,NY&zoom=14&size=512x512&maptype=roadmap &markers=color:blue|label:S|40.702147,-74.015794&markers=color:green|label:G|40.711614,-74.012318 &markers=color:red|color:red|label:C|40.718217,-73.998284&sensor=false

This works outside Wikipedia when I just paste it into the browser. When I try to turn it into a Wikipedia external link I start having problems. WP seems to insert a soft linefeed when the line starts getting uncomfortably long. Then it doesn't recognize the complete URL and mis-handles everthing after the gratuitous soft linefeed. I tried replacing all the pipe characters with 7C (hex), but that didn't fix it.

Questions:

• Is there some way to cut the long URL into chunks, with punctuation that lets WP reassemble it?
• Is there another, better way to get maps multiple markers than what I've tried?

LADave (talk) 02:03, 9 May 2010 (UTC)

Fixed it. The trick is replacing "=" with "{{=}}" and "|" with "{{!}}" (See here). LADave (talk) 10:43, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Please don't; use of {{Coord}} is standard across many thousand Wikipedia articles, and it does more than just provide a map link. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 11:29, 10 May 2010 (UTC)

Well, my whole point was *not* using {{coord... because it invokes GeoHacks, forcing Wikipedians to jump through hoops before they get anywhere near a map. I wanted something more immediate.LADave (talk) 06:44, 11 May 2010 (UTC)

I know that was your point; please try to understand mine. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 10:02, 12 May 2010 (UTC)

As I understand it, you urge us to use {{Coord}} in the hope that someday somebody will make it friendlier to the casual reader; and if there is recoding to be done, a bot may be able to do it. Meanwhile nearly a year has passed and things don't seem to have gotten friendlier.

The more intractable problem with {{Coord}} is that a satisfactory map is seldom reduceable to coordinates plus scale. The method I described isn't perfect either, but it gives the author much more control over what the reader sees, and so it improves communication. In any case perfection means more evolved maps, along the lines of Wikipedia's tutorials and conventions on the subject. {{Coord}} is too simple by orders of magnitude to describe maps on that level, if automation is even practical.

I tried {{Coord}} first. It was much easier. If it had done an acceptable job I would have used it. LADave (talk) 07:28, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

Template display

Hello. Is it just me, or is the template now showing the text in three lines instead of two (as of recently; a month)? Instead of "Map of all coordinates from Google <br> Map of all coordinates from Bing", it now shows as "Map of all coordinates from <br> Google <br> Map of all coordinates from Bing". Rehman⁽⁺⁾ 08:51, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

It's been doing that since a change in the template early this year. —EncMstr (talk) 00:42, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

 Fixed. Rehman⁽⁺⁾ 03:27, 8 September 2010 (UTC)

Head section

Is there a magic word to get only coords in the head section of article? This would be useful articles which have coords in a infobox, but also have coords in another section, like a train station with main coord and accesses coords, the latter aren't useful if you want to recurse the whole line.

Gonioul (talk) 22:22, 29 September 2010 (UTC)

Is there a better place to discuss it? Gonioul (talk) 00:13, 6 January 2011 (UTC)

Shouldn't the name be "GeoGroup"?

Shouldn't the name of this template be "GeoGroup" instead of "GeoGroupTemplate"? The wikilink is "Template:GeoGroupTemplate", which is sort of redundant. I propose it is changed. Jason Quinn (talk) 10:06, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

Category bug

The template, according to the documentation, is supposed to generate markers only for articles with title coordinates in categories. However, this is not the case. In this example, Category:Airports in Azerbaijan, the map has doubled markers. One set is for each of the articles that has an title coord template. The doubled markers come from the list article; however all the coord templates in the list article are are inline defaults. They should not be displayed. Jason Quinn (talk) 10:20, 27 October 2010 (UTC)

un-named location from infobox

Have a look at Careby Aunby and Holywell or Edenham Grimsthorpe Elsthorpe & Scottlethorpe & click the KML link. The co-ordinates from the infobox are being picked up as '#1', which spoils things a bit. I thought they were supposed to inherit the article title?

I have noticed that on all uses of this template. Most recently Klickitat Street. All the coordinates except the title coordinate are nicely labeled. The title appears as #7, at least with Google Maps. —EncMstr (talk) 23:27, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Auto-categorisation

Per WP:TEMPLATECAT, this template shouldn't be adding pages to normal content categories. Has this previously been discussed? Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) - talk 13:00, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

HTML anchors in back links

From this list sv:Lista över byggnadsminnen i Gävleborgs län, every listed place has a long ID number, which can be used as an HTML anchor when linking back to the list. For example, sv:Lista över byggnadsminnen i Gävleborgs län#21300000005709 will link to the specified item. Is it possible to make the KML file contain these anchors for each item, so when users look at one specific place in Google maps and clicks back to the list (coordinate source), they will arrive at that item? --LA2 (talk) 23:27, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Done, it's linking to the previous anchor of each item now. --Para (talk) 09:00, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Section option broken

What am I doing wrong. In List of World Heritage in Danger, the general (without "section" parameter) GeoGroupTemplate works perfectly but the two section templates appear broken (google maps link don't work, bing works). How can I fix it? bamse (talk) 00:56, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Fixed, Google had trouble with spaces in urls. --Para (talk) 09:00, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. bamse (talk) 12:38, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

coordinates in reference list

Am I doing something wrong or is this not supported. I am trying to add coordinates to an article without clogging up the text. Therefore trying reference option. Take a look here Rheinsteig and the last few edits where I have tried inside table too. Why does this not show in google or bing? --Traveler100 (talk) 19:29, 26 December 2011 (UTC)

It shows up okay in Google—now. I notice that sometimes changes don't show up for a few minutes after saving. Can you see it now? —EncMstr (talk) 00:57, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Yes I see it know, I guess I just did not wait long enough for other machines to catch up with my edits. --Traveler100 (talk) 07:29, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Rename

Please move to Template:GeoGroup; a shorter name, without the redundant "Template" part. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 19:14, 27 December 2011 (UTC)

Not done: page move requests should be made at Wikipedia:Requested moves. Anomie⚔ 16:31, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

 Done It is a proper request. Redirects from the old name should prevent any trouble. I am fixing the worst double redirects. —EncMstr (talk) 18:34, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

As this could affect up to 11,500 articles, I have checked carefully for any trouble. Everything seems okay. There was one error from Google Maps displaying this from Mount Hood glaciers, but it appears to have been a transitory problem at the toolserver: the first retry worked without a problem. —EncMstr (talk) 18:55, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

Thank you. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:56, 28 December 2011 (UTC)

template display change needed, to report just first 200 coords will be shown by Bing

The template needs to be edited to allow for some indication that a Bing map link shows just the first 200 coordinates in an article. For example, List of Masonic buildings in the United States is a big list article whose corresponding Google map shows all points, but the corresponding Bing map shows places from Alaska through Oregon, but not South Dakota, Virginia, Washington, Washington DC, etc. What is displayed by the GeoGroupTemplate must be editable to allow an editor to indicate "Map of first 200 coordinates from Bing" instead of "Map of all coordinates from Bing". --doncram 20:44, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

In this edit I found that I was able to change display that way. It would be better if a flag could be added to the template, allowing an editor to select the display "Map of first 200 coordinates from Bing" only when that is most relevant, i.e. when there are more than 200 coordinates in the article. --doncram 22:27, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

This does not work. It is now saying 200 coordinates even when there are just a few. Seeing the message that it would display 200 coordinates I expected to see 200 coordinates, imagine my disappointment when the map only showed a few. QuentinUK (talk) 5 January 2012 QuentinUK (talk) 18:28, 5 January 2012 (UTC)

Very impressed

Just to say I was very impressed with this template. Just used it with Category:Neighborhoods_of_Damascus and I found it extremely informative. Thanks to all involved! AndrewRT(Talk) 12:08, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

Bad URL issue

Unresolved

Given that http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://microform.at/geo/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockley_Brook works, can anyone please tell me what's wrong with this edit, which generates URLs like http://maps.google.com/maps?q=http%3A%2F%2Fmicroform.at%2Fgeo%2F%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FHockley_Brook ? Is it a {{urlencode}} issue? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:28, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

This is still an issue. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:24, 24 January 2012 (UTC)

Following bump at VPT:

The second link has ...at/geo///en... instead of ...at/geo/http://en.... Guessing that is an unexpected side-effect of the protocol dropping after the recent switch to protocol-neutral wikilinks. Presumably the "http:" could be hardcoded; or (per Help:Magic words#Paths) {{canonicalurl:pagename}} could be used to include the protocol with the wiki URL. — Richardguk (talk) 22:41, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

Purging

How can you purge the output? I am working on Listed buildings in Southampton and would like to check that I have got the co-ordinates correct, but it takes ages for the output to catch up with the data in the article. At present, the output, on both Google and Bing, is as it was 24 hours ago, even though I have added at least 20 more co-ordinates in that time and corrected a few others. Even looking from a different PC to that on which I have been creating the article shows the same output. Thanks for any help. -- Daemonic Kangaroo (talk) 10:03, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

I find that when making frequent updates to the source coords for the geogroup, and then viewing in google or bing, just remove the &usecache=1 from the link that appears in the box at the top. In your case just use http://toolserver.org/~para/cgi-bin/kmlexport?article=Listed_buildings_in_Southampton DubhEire (talk) 08:51, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

That works - thanks. -- Daemonic Kangaroo (talk) 10:10, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

Best of luck and watch out for performance issues with long lists on the article. If you get close to 200 or more, you may start to see problems in Bing. I haven't seen this myself, but it has been mentioned by a few. DubhEire (talk) 10:20, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

Why is the "&usecache=1" part of the code? Even when I delete my browsing history before clicking on the Google map link, the resulting output includes the &usecache=1 and it tells me that there are no geocodes in the article. Now that I know what to do, it isn't much of a problem, but a user seeing that will just close the window. Is there a parameter that can be added to the template to keep this from happening? This is the article I'm working on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Hjal/Fort_Bragg_Unified_School_District#Schools Thanks, --Hjal (talk) 20:55, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

It shouldn't take long for the toolserver to refresh with your list. Rather than remove the usecache=1 you can do usecache=0. Anyway I'm not 100% clear on what is happening, but it is not cache on your machine. It is the cache on the toolserver I believe. It is set the way it is by the people who were involved with it. It will be fine not too long after your edits are made. Don't worry. DubhEire (talk) 22:40, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

No really, why if it works with usecache=0 do we publish as usecache=1? Why are we aiming the pistol at our foot and firing? --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:15, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Problems with Usage text and example link?

The first Usage form is given as:

{{GeoGroup|article=article name}}

The name of article, from which included links to other articles from which the coordinates will be pulled out. (Can be a category, as shown in List of stations in London fare zone 2#List of stations)

This appears to have two problems:

First, the text: 'The name of article, from which included links to other articles from which the coordinates will be pulled out.' appears to be garbled or incomplete.

Perhaps it should read: 'The name of the article; coordinates will be pulled out of other articles which are linked to in the article.'

Second, the GeoGroup box in the example article for this usage: List of stations in London fare zone 2#List of stations produces no maps; both Google and Bing report no data.

Does anyone have the experience to rewrite the Usage text, and discover why the GeoGroup mechanism in the example article produces nothing?

Cricobr (talk) 21:33, 2 April 2012 (UTC)

Think I have fixed the category map problem in that article - the category seems to have been renamed. Is this the result you would expect? Oosoom ^Talk 13:09, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

Needs a title bar

This template needs some sort of title bar. Otherwise, it looks like the [show] link corresponds to the Google Map item (or whatever is listed first, which is very confusing. Kaldari (talk) 22:26, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

Failing to start googlemap

I have until recently being using this tool without any problem. However now when I click on the link to display googlemap ( e.g. at Category:Wikipedia requested photographs in Germany) it asks if I want to open a kml file then starts Google Earth with a point at zero long and zero lat. Any ideas what is causing this?--Traveler100 (talk) 12:59, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Problem was with toolserver, which has now been rebooted. problem solved. --Traveler100 (talk) 14:59, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Link

Is there any way of getting the map to link to the item in the article? The default is to #toctitle. I tried putting in anchors, but it does not pick up more than three, and I could not get it to link to the correct anchor. It links to the nearest reference, though. In the Tame Valley Canal example, what I am looking for is a way to link to each of the items from the map. For example, the M6 item should take me to the line M6 motorway in the article, instead of to Tame Valley Canal#toctitle. Apteva (talk) 20:53, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

This is exactly the question I came to ask. So, as well as using the coord|name= to give the list of names, could there be an optional |link parameter so that where included, the google map link would take people straight to the wikipedia article instead of back to the list? Is this technically feasible and if so does it stand any chance of being implemented? Thanks, RobinLeicester (talk) 20:38, 7 June 2013 (UTC)

I think it should link to wherever the coordinates are given. Mapping a category might be a good alternative for what you're looking to do, and a link to that can be placed on a page other than the category page. It's being used that way at List of hoards in Britain#External links for example. --Para (talk) 13:57, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

It's supposed to link to the previous id, so that the coordinates are visible when the link is clicked. That had broken with headings for some reason, but it should work again now. --Para (talk) 13:57, 9 June 2013 (UTC)

Bizarre URL generated from category

I have been adding this template to several categories, all of which have worked fantastically well. However, after adding it to category:Aquaria in Oregon, the Google Maps link is https://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://toolserver.org/~para/cgi-bin/kmlexport%3Farticle%3DCategory:Aquaria_in_Oregon%26l%3D0%26usecache%3D1++adding:+fbeb8caf27bfeedc3302f0880c1a270e.kml+%28deflated+72%25%29 Google Maps shows North America and gives a "we don't understand URL". Neither do I. What could have caused this?

When I used the browser "back" and clicked again, it worked fine. —EncMstr (talk) 20:40, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Apostrophe URLEncode

The toolserver kmlexport code encodes the apostrophe as %2526%252339%253B instead of %27, generating malformed URLs. Considering for example the category

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Gates_of_L%27Aquila

kmlexport generates the following URL (that doesn't work)

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://toolserver.org/~para/cgi-bin/kmlexport%3Farticle%3DCategory%253AGates%2Bof%2BL%2526%252339%253BAquila%26project%3DCommons

instead of

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://toolserver.org/~para/cgi-bin/kmlexport%3Farticle%3DCategory%253AGates%2Bof%2BL%27Aquila%26project%3DCommons

Pietro (talk) 01:45, 9 September 2013 (UTC)

There's a difference in what this template and commons:Template:GeoGroupTemplate do before passing anything on to the toolserver, and it's the Commons template at fault in this urlencoding nightmare. This template uses the FULLPAGENAMEE keyword, whereas Commons uses FULLPAGENAME. URLs break when they contain HTML encoded characters:

{{urlencode:{{urlencode:{{FULLPAGENAME}}}}}} → {{urlencode:{{urlencode:Category:Gates of L'Aquila}}}} → {{urlencode:Category%3AGates+of+L%26%2339%3BAquila}} → Category%253AGates%2Bof%2BL%2526%252339%253BAquila

{{urlencode:{{urlencode:{{FULLPAGENAMEE}}}}}} → {{urlencode:{{urlencode:Category:Gates_of_L%27Aquila}}}} → {{urlencode:Category%3AGates_of_L%2527Aquila}} → Category%253AGates_of_L%252527Aquila

They're double urlencoded because the article parameter is urlencoded first, and then again when the q parameter is urlencoded, since both can contain ampersands. --Para (talk) 23:15, 10 September 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for your analysis. Do you know if there is any action in place to fix it? Pietro (talk) 19:39, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

I've added the E there. --Para (talk) 17:14, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

Great, it works! Thank you, Pietro (talk) 20:10, 13 September 2013 (UTC)

It doesn't work anymore: the URL is back to https://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://toolserver.org/~para/cgi-bin/kmlexport%3Farticle%3DCategory%253AGates_of_L%252527Aquila%26project%3DCommons Pietro (talk) 13:23, 28 October 2013 (UTC)

With the same URL https://maps.google.com/maps?q=http://toolserver.org/~para/cgi-bin/kmlexport%3Farticle%3DCategory%253AGates_of_L%252527Aquila%26project%3DCommons , the map is displayed now Pietro (talk) 15:48, 31 October 2013 (UTC)

Placement

Is there any technical reason why this should go in the external links section as described in the documentation? I can see how it might be seen as the proper place per wikipedia's rules on external links, but other geocoord links are effectively external links too.

It looks very useful the way it is actually used in the documentation, ie alongside the list of coords, but the way it is used in Netherton Tunnel Branch Canal at the end of the page, it seems next to useless:

1. very few readers are going to find it,
2. if they do, they may well have already clicked through a list of other coords.

--Derek Andrews (talk) 15:55, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Indeed, I often find it more useful for this template to be placed at the top of the article, especially list articles with many coordinates: List of shoals of Oregon, List of crossings of the Willamette River, List of Mount Hood glaciers. I do not know of any technical or practical reason for the documented and common placement at the bottom. I agree with changing the documentation to reflect this sensibility. —EncMstr (talk) 22:28, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

I too suggest we update the documentation. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:30, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Use of bold

The template as it stands displays the first lines "Map of all coordinates..., Map of up to 200..." in bold. I don't believe that this is consistent with MOS:BOLD. So far as I can tell, the bold appears because those two lines are defined as a table heading - although it does not appear to the reader as table. The obvious solution is to change the "table" so that it has no heading, ie those lines are just normal table rows. However this stops the "collapse" functions from working. My knowledge of tables is not good enough for me to see an obvious alternative solution.

Could someone please change the template so that those first two lines are not in bold. Mitch Ames (talk) 14:08, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

commercial vs. free

Why is Google Maps and Bing Maps used here and not the free OpenStreetMap? 87.78.29.67 (talk) 11:56, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Because OSM (of which I am a strong advocate) does not have a facility to overlay and display the KML which we pass to the other services. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 16:28, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Deutch version uses the link [http://www.lenz-online.de/cgi-bin/wiki/wiki-osm.pl?project={{CONTENTLANGUAGE}}{{#if: {{{linked|}}}|&linksfrom=1}}&article={{urlencode:{{{1|{{FULLPAGENAMEE}}}}}}}{{#if: {{{section|}}}|&section={{urlencode:{{{section}}}}}}} OSM] from project de:User:Plenz/OSM for Wiki. --Vriullop (talk) 21:27, 30 March 2014 (UTC)

Naming the tags?

Maybe I missed something, but is there a way to give names to the tags taken from a single article? I'm marking up Duga-3 but the map page doesn't tell you what the numbers mean. Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:32, 20 April 2014 (UTC)

Yes, add the name parameter to each coordinate. I'll demonstrate in the article. —EncMstr (talk) 16:11, 20 April 2014 (UTC)

Nevermind. The article uses a template which invokes a module which does not handle the name parameter. Either upgrade the module (which doesn't look trivial at first), or use explicit {{coord}}s in the article. —EncMstr (talk) 16:17, 20 April 2014 (UTC)

Protocol-relative URL

Is there a reason Protocol-relative URLs are not used by this template? 87.78.26.238 (talk) 04:44, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

OSM is available!

Meanwhile I moved my project "OSM 4 Wiki" to the wikimedia tool server. The German Template "AllCoordinates" is using it already. See this German example and this English example --84.118.213.90 (talk) 19:50, 8 May 2014 (UTC)

why are not all coords showing up on some pages?

The latest one I've had this problem is Yale First Nation, where only 10 of 17 coordinates on the page show up; others in items in List of Kwakwaka'wakw villages and maybe various related island and channel articles e.g. Gilford Island and Tribune Channel and various others. Is there some change in the code for the template that suppresses more than so many at a time?Skookum1 (talk) 05:31, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

I note that I'm using {{GeoGroupTemplate}} rather than {{GeoGroup}}. Is there a difference, since the former redirects here to the latter?Skookum1 (talk) 05:32, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

You are probably experiencing a caching issue. The addition of coords to Yale First Nation were recent (I didn't check the others), so they don't show up until the toolserver cache (if there is one) and the Wikimedia squid caches are refreshed. You can force the latter by adding &action=purge to the URL when you view the source article once. Or you can just wait 3–48 hours. —EncMstr (talk) 14:40, 15 May 2014 (UTC)

In Yale First Nation there are only 10 unique coordinates, 7 are duplicates, so it shows 10 nor 17. --Vriullop (talk) 06:35, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Several coords for one site

I have set up coords in List of Local Nature Reserves in Greater London formatted for kml, with kind assistance from Rodw. I forgot that Natural England gives two coords for some sites which are in separated areas, and only gave the name= parameter once for each site, so some locations show up on the map just as numbers. I am not sure of the best way of dealing with this. Do I need to have duplicate headings on the map or is it possible to stop kml from seeing selected coords? This will be a problem with other lists - some SSSI citations give 4 coords. Thanks for any advice. Dudley Miles (talk) 19:42, 22 July 2014 (UTC)

KML files on Google Maps

Google have announced changes to the use of kml files on google maps. Will this require any action on articles which use the kml template?— Rod ^talk 18:42, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

Article pages should not be impacted: That is why we have templates. The changes will be confined to this template and/or the mapping resource handler page https://tools.wmflabs.org/geohack/geohack.php or its successor. The change doesn't occur until February and it seems it is easy to address. See WT:GEO#Google_Maps_and_.7B.7BGeoGroupTemplate.7D.7D. —EncMstr (talk) 19:02, 21 November 2014 (UTC)

I came to report the same news. Ping User:Para FYI. --Jeremyb (talk) 23:33, 26 December 2014 (UTC)

Technically it would be an easy change, and Google have all the code laid out for it already. Someone just needs to set up a landing page somewhere with the code on it, and change all the templates and tools on Wikipedia(s) to point to the new site instead of the Google site. However...

• For some use of the Google Maps Javascript API that needs to be used, it must be loaded using a key from Google. Obtaining the key requires the developer to personally register themselves and the site with Google.
• Google have limits on the number of free map loads allowed from a site before payment is required: https://developers.google.com/maps/usagelimits/ The various KML content linked from all the Wikimedia wikis is most likely over that limit.
• The most obvious place for this Wikipedia related page would be on a Wikimedia Labs server, but the Labs Terms of use may not be compatible with embedding stuff from Google.
• There will most certainly be feature requests for the site that someone will need to implement and maintain. There is much more room for customisation when a Wikipedian is responsible for the site, rather than just the KML content.

It's going to be very time consuming once you add in these inconvenient additional bits, so unfortunately I'm going to have to pass. As far as this template goes, all I can do (after the landing page exists) is change where the tool sends people when it's called with redir=google. Some other volunteer could probably be convinced to step up and do the groundwork just so that there's something to link to, but the paid staffers will need to intervene at some point. --Para (talk) 01:45, 27 December 2014 (UTC)

OSM

Any updates on OSM addition? Found in archive link to German implemenatation, but it is slow and does not seem to work (https://tools.wmflabs.org/osm4wiki/cgi-bin/wiki/wiki-osm.pl?project=en&article=List_of_rapids_of_the_Columbia_River%26section%3DSnake_River_to_Bridgeport). I found nice fast osm kml display here, but it does not accept our kmlexport kml due to missing file extension (how however kml produced by kmlexport and saved somewhere else works without problem) and code itself does not seem to be open source. --Jklamo (talk) 17:04, 30 December 2014 (UTC)

Adding a new external resource

I have a website with implemented Google Maps, which displays the coordinates in order (and with the pins interlinked).

I have added an option for external KML resources, and it's much nicer in the case of routes / hikes / pilgrimages: The website is http://mumimhere.info and the map with the KML is: http://mumimhere.info/kml/?kml=tools.wmflabs.org%2Fkmlexport%2F%3Farticle%3DCh%25C5%25ABgoku_33_Kannon_Pilgrimage

I understand (for what I can read in this Talk) that this might consume my Google Maps API usage limit (I think it's 25,000 map loads per day). I don't believe people will go for my option before Google or Bing, but some might. If it goes over the limit but you like the website, as @Para said, "There will most certainly be feature requests for the site that someone will need to implement and maintain. There is much more room for customization when a Wikipedian is responsible for the site, rather than just the KML content," someone (or me) could be responsible for maintaining a site (Mum I'm Here) exclusively for Wikipedia GeoGroup. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nicojonesgodel (talk • contribs) 04:22, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Please consider adding it to the GeoGroup template. Thank you — Preceding unsigned comment added by Nicojonesgodel (talk • contribs) 04:15, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Reducing verbosity

One of the distracting aspects of this template is that it produces a surprisingly verbose floating box, even before it is expanded.

I have removed the overly verbose "of"s from "Map of " URL labels in an effort to whittle it down a bit. I wonder if "coordinates" could be shortened to "points" as well?

Also, currently each URL label renders on two lines for me:

Map all coordinates from         [show]
Google
Map up to 200 coordinates from
Bing

Playing around with my browser's settings, I can't affect the two line rendering.

What about revising this to something like this?:

Map all points with:     [show]
 Google    Bing

Comments? —EncMstr (talk) 22:37, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

Map {{abbr|PoIs|points of interest}}? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 22:52, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

Map PoIs? I'll give you that it is short. Alas, it looks vaguely obscene.

Maybe it should just be Map points with: —EncMstr (talk) 23:59, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

"vaguely obscene"?! Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 10:59, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

What did I do wrong?

I added the template to Brisbane River and the Google map shows all the reaches with their name parameter (where supplied). Great! So I added the template to Bridges over the Brisbane River and the Google map doesn't display the name parameter but calls everything #1, #2 etc. I can't see what I have done differently. Any advice would be most welcome. Thanks. Kerry (talk) 04:03, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

It looks like everything is right. I tweaked a few inconsequential issues (feel free to revert) in case there is a new pathology. I think the external tool which interprets the coordinates is being confused by the article's subsections which is something it did years ago and I thought was discussed and fixed here, but that fix didn't work, though there could be caching issues keeping it from working immediately Maybe the maintainer of that tool, @Para:, will comment? —EncMstr (talk) 15:14, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

Google caches all the kml it fetches, especially if you keep hammering it after updates. You can change the kml url slightly to make it think it's a new one, like mentioned at Template:GeoGroup#Cache delay. --Para (talk) 17:44, 23 January 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, all! It seems to be working, so it was probably was the caching issue as you suggest. It's a great template to have and now that I know about it, I think I'll be adding it to a lot more Queensland content, especially geographic lists. Like pictures, maps are worth a thousand words. Kerry (talk) 23:20, 25 January 2015 (UTC)

Viewing KML data in Google Maps

It appears that links to https://maps.google.com/ - such as the one titled "Map all microformatted coordinates" in this template - will stop working soon, see https://support.google.com/maps/answer/41136?p=kml&hl=en&rd=1 and https://developers.google.com/maps/support/kmlmaps. --Redrose64 (talk) 19:53, 25 February 2015 (UTC)

Yup, that's why generally we don't use such commercial services... Because they can do stuff like pulling the plug, without us being able to fork. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 13:29, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

See related discussion: Template talk:Attached KML#Viewing KML data in Google Maps. --Edgars2007 (talk/contribs) 14:46, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

The thing is, we don't have to fork. If Google and Bing both stop hosting KMLs, the template still falls back on the WikiMiniAtlas, which is shown in the title view if no parameters are given to the template. TCN7JM 14:50, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

Er...never mind. This thread was linked to elsewhere, and I thought we were talking about the same template {{Attached KML}}. I don't know what this template does. Sorry. TCN7JM 15:57, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

@TCN7JM: See e.g. Channel Tunnel#External links, the topmost box on the right-hand side of that section. Click "[show]" to expand the box, and "Map all microformatted coordinates" will be visible second from bottom. --Redrose64 (talk) 16:07, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

Well, I mean, I know what the template does, per se; I meant that I don't know what it has as a backup if Google Maps goes kaput. TCN7JM 16:11, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

• I'm cross-posting this to both threads. I suggest we get in contact with OSM and try and do away with providing any service to Google. Let's work with a fellow open-source service that would actually be appreciative of a mutual arrangement. - Floydian ^τ _¢ 16:55, 26 February 2015 (UTC)

Speaking as someone with this at Featured List Candidates, could someone please get in contact with OpenStreetMap so that the list can get its whole raison d'être back! Ham II (talk) 20:13, 3 March 2015 (UTC)

Added OSM. Is it working well? --тнояsтеn ⇔ 07:28, 13 March 2015 (UTC)

It doesn't appear to work on any of the articles I have tested. It just shows a map of the world, with a box at the left hand side saying "Toolserver error" "tool labs". Also the Bing option goes to a "No webservice" page. Bob1960evens (talk) 10:51, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

http://tools.wmflabs.org/kmlexport/ has been down a lot recently. Now it is working again. --тнояsтеn ⇔ 14:56, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. It is indeed working at the moment. Bob1960evens (talk) 16:54, 14 March 2015 (UTC)

Excessive KMLExport downtimes

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T92963

Hello. Any ideas, why there's so terribly poor service availability on the toolservers, hosting the KMLExport tool? It virtually seems to be in prevailing "Internal error" state these days, being interruped by short intervals of normal operation. It's quite hard to justify and defend the presence of GeoGroup-equivalent templates in the articles, with the links pointing to HTTP 500 page most of the time... :( --Teslaton (talk) 20:19, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

User:Para moved his tool on Labs ([10]). Hope this helps. --2A02:810D:1080:23D8:5489:FE9A:37D0:9486 (talk) 21:08, 15 March 2015 (UTC)

Reported here: phab:T92963. --тнояsтеn ⇔ 15:27, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Bing working?

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T92963

Today I tried printing a map from Bing. Actually just tried to get a map on screen with Bing and got the message

"Only KML, KMZ, GeoRss and GPX formats are supported" Sounds terrible.

Open maps comes up but does not allow me to print.

Smallbones_(smalltalk) 16:26, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

Bing works for me for List of bridges in Perth, Western Australia. Which article were you trying? - Evad37 [talk] 00:44, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

Your bridges list worked for me, but my photography list User:Smallbones/delco doesn't work now, even though it worked 2 days ago. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 01:35, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

It seems to work if you if you remove %26usecache%3D1 from the end of the url, i.e. http://www.bing.com/maps/?mapurl=http%3A%2F%2Ftools.wmflabs.org%2Fkmlexport%2F%3Farticle%3DUser%3ASmallbones%2Fdelco . I'm not sure why that makes it work, especially since the bridge article I linked works with that bit of code at the end of the url. - Evad37 [talk] 02:22, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks, it works for me too. Smallbones_(smalltalk) 04:24, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

Neither OS nor Bing works for me today from this template. A temporary problem?Mange01 (talk) 20:55, 5 June 2015 (UTC)

I don't know what the problem is, but they're not working for me, either. Deor (talk) 00:03, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

See phabricator:T92963 --ŠJů (talk) 18:06, 6 June 2015 (UTC)

Bing still not working

This tool no longer works with Bing. Deleting the "use cache" parameter has no effect. And what happened to the link to Google Maps? •••Life of Riley (T–C) 19:44, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

@Life of Riley:It does work for me, on Altiplano-Puna volcanic complex. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 22:35, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

OK,it looks it is somehow related to Firefox. I tried it in IE and it works satisfactorily there. I can't imagine what the problem is in Firefox. •••Life of Riley (T–C) 22:53, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

For me it does work in Firefox... Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 22:57, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Google Maps went west six months ago, see Template talk:GeoGroup/Archive 1#Viewing KML data in Google Maps. --Redrose64 (talk) 23:45, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Google maps working?

After noticing a Google maps link on a German Wikipedia article, I had a look, and they seem to have KML overlays working on some sort of Google maps instance on tools.wmflabs.org. Template:Attached KML has already been updated with the new link. I've now added code to this template's sandbox, and it seems to work on the articles I tried. If someone else can test it on some more pages, and see that the various template options are working as expected, then I think we can add Google maps back into the main template. - Evad37 [talk] 06:35, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

I've updated the testcases page with examples (from the documentation) - Evad37 [talk] 14:23, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

 Added to template - Evad37 [talk] 11:07, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

Jump to map box works only once?

Jump to map box (within the article) seems to work only once, meaning clicking on it the second time doesn't seem to work. Is it a bug or a limitation? Sanglahi86 (talk) 09:11, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

Within which article? --Redrose64 (talk) 11:58, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

I've tested it in my sandbox since I was just planning to use the template. The GeoGroup template is nested inside a table. The Jump to map box worked fine during the first (and/or second) click/s, but not after the succeeding ones. (I know one would very rarely click on the jump to box a number of times but it appears to be a minor bug). Sanglahi86 (talk) 12:15, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

Doesn't do anything for me, not even on first click. --Redrose64 (talk) 21:08, 6 February 2016 (UTC)

Google Maps

Google Maps does not seem to work again. --Jklamo (talk) 20:02, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Worked fine for me a minute ago at Danforth Avenue (HBLR station). Maybe it's been repaired already. Jim.henderson (talk) 20:32, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

Oh. You meant this template for, among other things, categories. So, it worked a minute ago for me at Category:Central Railroad of New Jersey. Jim.henderson (talk) 20:38, 9 April 2016 (UTC)

List all coordinates in a wikiarticle (even without direct coordinates)

Hello, with Pierre cb (talk · contribs), we noticed that the KML code works fine only with

• Categories (and their subcategories)
• Wikiarticle (provided they display full coordinates somewhere in the wikiarticle inside). Example : Netherton_Tunnel_Branch_Canal#Features

==> is there a way so that the KML be producing all coordinates from any link inside wikiarticle (even without coordinates). Example : KLM_destinations#List

Thanks --Bouzinac (talk) 15:31, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

Google Maps II

Google Maps does not seem to work in List of lighthouses and lightvessels in Chile: NGA1155.8–NGA1312. --Keysanger (talk) 12:24, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

Three minutes ago it failed for me, for the lighthouse list and for the railroad category. One minute ago, it worked for both. Glitch, somewhere. Jim.henderson (talk) 13:42, 16 April 2016 (UTC)

@Pigsonthewing:: Andy, are you still active in maintaining this template? If not, can you suggest someone who might be? The link to Google maps fails about 90% of the time for me on here, and almost always on Commons, and sadly I'm in over my head trying to fix it. Pi.1415926535 (talk) 15:53, 20 August 2016 (UTC)

I noticed this error also: the google maps group still does not display correctly, though about a year ago it worked fine, so something was changed in the meantime. The location anchors jump around in the general area concerned, especially as you zoom out, when their position relative to each another converges on a straight line, which is usually plotted on the fraction of the map which is displayed, whether that is the correct area or not. JMK (talk) 10:31, 24 October 2016 (UTC)

Bing link is not working

Bing link is not working neither here nor on Commons. --Jarekt (talk) 03:30, 6 November 2016 (UTC)

Here we are, three and a half days later, and Bing still doesn't work. It shows where I am, sitting at my desk, which I already know. Jim.henderson (talk) 20:15, 9 November 2016 (UTC)

Make the category link in the OSM display a clickable link to just items in that category

If I have a category with GeoGroup|level=0 the OSM display shows the categories on the LHS. Individual items are hyperlinked to their articles under a tree of categories, could the tree root nodes be hyperlinks to maps of that category only. So I start with Museums in England, find a military one, then realise what I wanted was to just see the military museums, so chose a Military Museum category hyperlink which brings up a map with just those museums. Vicarage (talk) 16:47, 21 November 2016 (UTC)

display=none not exported

I've just tried a WP:GEO pass over The Grand Tour (TV series) article, with coordinates having |display=none to avoid breaking up the prose. Only a single coordinate is being passed through to the WMFlabs/OSM view, and zero passed through to the Google/Bing views. Could anyone make any suggestions as to what might be happening, or solutions? (Ideally, keeping |display=none on the majority of coordinates please). —Sladen (talk) 14:50, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

List articles

Has something gone wrong? In List of New York City Designated Landmarks in Queens, OSM works properly. Google Maps only shows a few locations far away in New Jersey, thus not relevant. Bing shows no locations at all.

This was me, in December but I forgot to sign. Tonight OSM and GM are working properly. Bing shows no locations at all. Jim.henderson (talk) 00:57, 26 January 2017 (UTC)

There doesn't seem to be any way to get KML files to display on Bing Maps – the link should probably be removed from the template. - Evad37 [talk] 05:36, 26 January 2017 (UTC)

Template does not work for OSM, Google or Bing

If I follow the links (https://tools.wmflabs.org/osm4wiki/cgi-bin/wiki/wiki-osm.pl?project=en&article=Template%3AGeoGroup&section=Examples, https://tools.wmflabs.org/wp-world/googlmaps-proxy.php?page=https:%2F%2Ftools.wmflabs.org%2Fkmlexport%3Farticle%3DTemplate:GeoGroup%26section%3DExamples&output=classic, https://tools.wmflabs.org/kmlexport?article=Template%3AGeoGroup&section=Examples&redir=bing) in the example for "Netherton Tunnel Branch Canal" with Firefox 52.0.2 (Linux):

• for OSM I get "sorry, no data to show" and a world map,
• for Google I get five and a half world maps next to each other with the top and bottom third of the screen gray with no indicators, and
• for Bing I get a map of my location (Hamburg) with no indicators (probably the default page).

The same happens in List of stations in London fare zone 6#List of stations for https://tools.wmflabs.org/osm4wiki/cgi-bin/wiki/wiki-osm.pl?project=en&article=Category%3AStations+in+London+fare+zone+6, https://tools.wmflabs.org/wp-world/googlmaps-proxy.php?page=https:%2F%2Ftools.wmflabs.org%2Fkmlexport%3Farticle%3DCategory:Stations_in_London_fare_zone_6&output=classic and https://tools.wmflabs.org/kmlexport?article=Category%3AStations+in+London+fare+zone+6&redir=bing. --Tim Landscheidt (talk) 18:52, 14 April 2017 (UTC)

Bing hasn't worked for a while now, and should be removed from the template. The other links do work, at least for some random articles I looked at which use this template (Area 51, Channel Tunnel, Geography of Italy). The London fare zone 6 links don't work because Category:Stations in London fare zone 6 doesn't exist, so there are no coordinates to be displayed. - Evad37 [talk] 00:21, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

You're right; as I don't know whether Category:Rail transport stations in London fare zone 6 is identical or just a subset of the missing category, I'll remove the template inclusions where they don't work and leave a note on the talk page. Thanks! --Tim Landscheidt (talk) 02:51, 15 April 2017 (UTC)

Template-protected edit request on 20 March 2017

The carriage return after the "</noinclude>" tag adds a whitespace line if the template is placed after another template, as here: Mekong#External links. Would you please be so kind as to delete that carriage return?—DocWatson42 (talk) 15:50, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Done The entire protection template can go, the documentation system does it. — Train2104 (t • c) 16:10, 20 March 2017 (UTC)

Thank you! ^_^ — DocWatson42 (talk) 11:16, 17 April 2017 (UTC)

Help to adapt to gl.wikipedia

Hi, I wanted to adapt that template to gl.wiki to get it working with GoogleMaps, but the problem is that option tries to get coordinates from the article at en.wikipedia. The template, at test, is here, and it's used here. The option to show coordinates at OpenStreetMap works ok, but the option to show coordinates at GoogleMaps, doesn't works. Could somebody help me to fix the problem? Thanks!, Elisardojm (talk) 09:58, 22 June 2017 (UTC)

microform.at

The domain microform.at can't be found in the DNS registry. I propose removing the "Map all microformatted coordinates" and "Place data as RDF" links from this template. --1Veertje (talk) 10:04, 18 September 2017 (UTC)