Arguments for and against {{coord missing}} producing visible tags in articles.
For
editWhy coordinates?
editCore policies
edit- Article about places that do not contain a clear description of where they are are missing possibly the single most important piece of data about that place; adding that information is an essential part of Wikipedia's core encyclopedic goal
- Coordinates provide a verifiable citation to dozens of independent third-party reliable sources (maps, satellite photography, GIS databases) that can be used to verify the existence of, and correct location of, the subject of the article; see WP:V, WP:RS
- Coordinates Wikipedia:Build the web by automatically allowing the discovery of nearby places
Benefits to editors
edit- Coordinates make articles visible on resources such as Google Maps, and thus draw editors to articles, encouraging development of those articles; this is particularly relevant to geographic stubs
- Coordinates allow the generation of new types of on-wiki resources, such as the miniatlas
- Coordinates provide third-party reusers with useful information, can be used to integrate Wikipedia with GIS applications
- Coordinates can help interwiki linking
- Insistence on adding coordinates makes it harder to create hoax articles
- Bad coordinates are self-cleaning over time; editors familiar with the subject can see at a glance that an article is in the wrong place when checking out the map link
- The mere act of addition of coordinates draws editors to articles
Why {{coord missing}}?
edit- Most articles aren't geotaggable, but hundreds of thousands are, many of which still need coordinates
- Not all articles can be automatically geocoded from databases; those that can be, already are
- {{coord missing}} helps identify and categorize the subset that haven't yet been coded by the bot, and therefore may need tagging by hand
- Many editors are now adding these tags to articles when creating them, and removing them by adding coordinates
- In addition, the geolocation bot can add these tags to articles that it can identify as taggable, but not code by itself
- This is highly effective, with hundreds of articles now being tagged by hand each day, even without the tags being visible to all editors; this activity is already highly correlated with tagging activity, as can be seen from the output of Para's coord missing tool
Why visible tags?
edit- Visible tags encourage the addition of coordinates to articles
- With a backlog of tens of thousands of articles to be tagged, we need help from "drive-by" contributors; visible tags are intentionally a means to pull in general contributors with specific interest in the subject of the article.
- It also draws the attention of personality types that are attracted to map resources and consider adding coordinates to be recreational
- The visible tag makes the need visible to all readers, not just wikigeeks
- The current process using invisible {{coord missing}} is currently removing ~250 tags a day; undoubtedly, visible tags will multiply that rate since all users will be able to see the need
- Follows a convention established by {{orphan}}, {{wikify}}, {{merge}} and others
- {{coord missing}} is discrete and occupies a space only ever used to display coordinates
Why not on the talk page instead?
edit- Although it is generally established that WikiProject coordination tags should go on talk pages, instead of in the article body, this is not such an activity.
- Coordinate tagging, like other forms of citation tagging, is not a WikiProject-specific activity; even now, the vast majority of taggers and tag-removers are not members of the geographical coordinates wikiproject
- Adding inline tags to demand verification, such as {{fact}} and {{who}} is already standard practice, and is massively used all over Wikipedia; see Category:Citation and verifiability maintenance templates and Category:Inline templates for the wide range of such tags
- If you put the tag on the talk page, you can't make it visible to drive-by editors, which defeats the entire point of visible tagging, see below
- Putting {{coord missing}} in the article body allows category intersection with the main article category tree in ways that would not be possible if it was put in the talk page; this is invaluable for maintenance purposes, because the article category tree is much more fine-grained than that of WikiProjects, and relevant WikiProjects simply do not exist for many cases
Against
edit- Visible tags make Wikipedia look unfinished
- Visible tags clutter up articles
- These should be WikiProject coordination tags, not in-article tags
- Slippery-slope argument: if one Wikiproject can do it, why not every one? This will fill articles up with tags asking for extra information
- No-one WP:OWNs articles
- We don't want random people to geotag articles; they might add bad coordinates, let's leave it to the experts
- The no free photo—do you own one? campaign for biographical articles (March–April 2008) was stopped for several reasons, generally summarized as being disruptive to the tagged articles; coord missing would be some fraction of that
- Applying these tags to tens of thousands of articles is an exceptional change to Wikipedia, and should not be done without good reason
Counter-arguments to objections
edit- Wikipedia is unfinished; the tags are there to help get it finished
- Visible {{coord missing}} tags are small and discreetly positioned, unlike templates such as {{copyedit}}
- They use space which is only used for coordinates, and do not take up any space within the article body itself
- There is already well-established precedent for the use of inline verification tags and for the mass tagging of articles; many of the existing inline verification/cleanup tags are already used in tens or hundreds of thousands of articles, see for example {{orphan}}
- {{coord missing}} tags are, in any case, self-eliminating, see above
- If you don't want random people adding information to articles, you've come to the wrong encyclopedia project
- Agreed, no-one WP:OWNs articles; issues should be decided on the balance of encyclopedic merit alone; see all of the above for discussion