Template talk:Coord

Placement of the center of a location?

Greetings and felicitations. The section title is awkward, but I can't think of a better way to phrase it. In particular with cities (and other larger areas), what coordinates should I use—the geographic center of the area in question, or the business district/center of activity? —DocWatson42 (talk) 04:06, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

Edit: An example: North Haven, Maine. One set of coordinates was in the infobox, and another at the bottom of the article (as is often the case with American municipalities and counties), which I moved to the infobox, to aid in comparing the two. The first points to the northern part of the island, near the (possible) geographic center of the island, while the second appears to point to the business district. —DocWatson42 (talk) 04:14, 29 October 2023 (UTC)

Bumping. —DocWatson42 (talk) 08:58, 17 May 2024 (UTC)

Bumping again, in part to avoid the archiving of this topic. —DocWatson42 (talk) 18:07, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

@DocWatson42: Many settlements grew up around the place where two transport routes met, such as a crossroads, or a bridge over a river. I would pick that point, if it can be identified. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 22:13, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

Okay—so the human, rather than the geographic, center (assuming there is one, and it can be identified)? —DocWatson42 (talk) 22:23, 10 September 2024 (UTC)

Should this template mark itself with noexcerpt?

Hi there we got a bug report phab:T352706 about page previews not showing for links like Arkansas.

Generally we recommend moving such meta data below the lead section/bottom of the article but another approach would be to add the noexcerpt class to the element per mw:Extension:Popups#How_can_I_remove_content_from_a_page_preview?.

Thanks in advance for your help. Jdlrobson (talk) 23:19, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

@Jdlrobson this continues to be an issue because of Module_talk:Coordinates#Protected_edit_request_on_29_May_2023, further discussion above at #Preview page broken. No one tuned in to what I had to say so no one has done anything. I have now merged that task to phab:T338204 of which it is a duplicate now. Izno (talk) 23:44, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Appears to be fixed now by Jdlrobson identifying a bug here in the service. If you see someone else report this problem, and it appears to be caused by coordinates, send them here and or ping both of us. Izno (talk) 17:53, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

Blank line before coord

I've seen {{coord}} with and without a blank line before it, and came to the doc to see if there was any guidance on that, but didn't find any, nor did I easily find anything in the talk archives.

So out of curiosity, and my own weird version of fun, I decided to see which format is more prevalent. I got as many mainspace-transcluded pages as I could - 1,000,000. Then, I threw away any pages where no {{coord}} started on a new line - i.e. failed to match \n *{{\s*coord\s*[\|}] (after bypassing all redirects), which left 261,175 pages. Of these:

• 73.6% (192,120) had at least 1 blank line before (i.e. matched \n\s*\n\s*{{\s*coord\s*[\|}]), and
• 26.4% (69,055) did not have a blank line before.

To me, this result makes sense, since {{coord}} is usually sandwiched between navs and DEFAULTSORT/cats, so it doesn't belong abutting either.

So, given the clear preference for a blank line before, and to prevent editors from going back and forth between styles (not that I've looked for, nor seen that, but it's plausible), is it worth adding this to the documentation as (lightly?) suggested usage?   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  19:40, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

@Tom.Reding: MOS:ORDER applies. Normally, coord is used at the bottom of an article, where it should be after all navboxes but before the defaultsort (if there is one) or cats (if there isn't). There may be a blank line before it, after it, or both. Sometimes you'll find a coord in between two navboxes, this often causes a visual gap so the coord should be moved below them. If used at the top of an article (and outside the infobox), there should be no blank lines. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 20:37, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

@Redrose64: agreed. I'm interested in addressing the "There may be a blank line before it, after it, or both." part (only when at the bottom of the page, and not displayed inline), and changing it to something like "There should usually be a blank line before it and after it", or weaker, since I'm sure there are some exceptions out there. The vast majority of pages I've seen (conservatively, at least 90%) with {{coord}} on the bottom have a blank line after it, and most of the cases where it's missing are due to it being misplaced nearby, like amongst the navs, or between DEFAULTSORT & cats.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  21:15, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Coords get used in tables, lists, infoboxes, and in-line text, where blank lines would usually make no sense. But, even at the bottom of an article, what each of us sees is somewhat different as rendering depends on our device, the size of the window, our chosen skin, preferences, gadgets, and whatever else. So being overly concerned about layout is often a waste of time as others are seeing the rendered article differently in any case. Kerry (talk) 22:12, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Personally I don't like blank lines in wikicode, but I won't get too bothered — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:07, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Extra parameters, part 1: dull, but utilitarian

I propose the following extra parameters for {{coord}}: dim, region, and type, to replace the existing string representation of "dim:xxx_region:yyy_type:zzz". This would have the advantage of being easier to use using standard template mechanics, making this metadata useful, for example, for assigning pages to categories.

This has the disadvantage that it might break some off-wiki tools that perform analysis on coord metadata, but changing those tools to the new syntax should be trivial: a matter of changing a couple of regular expressions.

As we move toward closer integration with Wikidata, it would also be useful to tag coord templates with a source parameter. Values for this parameter might be "wikidata", "GNS", "GNIS" or possibly other values. This would initially be purely a tracking parameter, and can be ignored by the template logic, but it provides a place to stash away metadata, and provide a hook for future expansion if need be. — The Anome (talk) 19:10, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

• Support - this seems like a long overdue standardization. The current usage looks very out-of-place compared to the rest of a page's wikitext, and like something pulled from the metadata, and not something editors can relatively intuitively interact with.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  19:41, 7 February 2024 (UTC)
  • Thanks. Implementing it with a bot would be easy, but the bot will take weeks to complete the run, even at one edit per second. I will try to reach out to the operators of the analysis tools, if I can remember who they are. — The Anome (talk) 20:20, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Please can you explain dim, region and type for those unfamiliar with the template? — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:05, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

@MSGJ: See Template:Coord#dim:D, Template:Coord#region:R and Template:Coord#type:T. Generally, dim is redundant if type is specified, and vice versa. region is independent of both of these. So we might have |type:railwaystation_region:GB-OXF. --Redrose64 🌹 (talk) 21:46, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

lets first introduce the new ones, then deprecated the old one. Also, I think... I or someone else might have already did this once in the sandbox version. possibly for the kartographer variant of the template that was never released ? —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 08:37, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

I think we need to understand what exactly "Coordinate parameters are parameters that {{Coord}} passes to the map server" means. There are more than three such parameters, and all this change seems like a lot-of-work-so-nothing-would-change. The last unnamed param can be parsed by the module, where needed, so I question the usefulness of having separate template params. Ponor (talk) 15:12, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

Extra parameters, part 2: the exciting one

I also propose a qid parameter to allow the specification of a Wikidata QID for a {{coord}} template.

For most pages the Wikidata QID will be that of the linked Wikidata entity for that page and so the qid parameter would be redundant and should be omitted, but there is one very important case where a QID parameter would be very useful, and that is the use of {{coord}} to refer to multiple, identifiable objects that do not by themselves meet the Wikipedia notability threshold, but do meet Wikidata's criteria for inclusion.

A good example are the lists of listed buildings like Grade I listed buildings in Devon. Each entry in that article refers to an individual building that appears in authoritative databases that make it worthy of a Wikidata entry: linking the {{coord}} for that entry to a corresponding QID provides a way to link these between the Wikipedia and Wikidata domains, opening up the way to closer cross-wiki integration at a later date. — The Anome (talk) 19:10, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

• Support for more wikidata usage & integration.   ~ Tom.Reding (talk ⋅dgaf)  19:41, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Sounds good. Would it be worth disabling the title display version if the qid does not match the current article's qid? This would avoid misleading or incorrect information. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 22:04, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

There already is one, isn't there ? 38.895°N 77.0367°W / 38.895; -77.0367 —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 09:22, 8 February 2024 (UTC)

GeoGroup

Since we are encouraging people to use GeoGroup, can we get it fixed as it is not working at all, just hangs when you try to display all the coords. Kerry (talk) 23:23, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

But if you wait long enough, it will display a map of the world with an error message saying "No data to display". Kerry (talk) 23:33, 22 February 2024 (UTC)

Template is not compatible with night mode

The coordinates icon is not displaying very well in the new upcoming night theme: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/F54691215 Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix,_Arizona?vectornightmode=1&useskin=vector-2022

Is it perhaps time to update this icon, perhaps to one of the map icons in https://doc.wikimedia.org/codex/latest/icons/all-icons.html ? 🐸 Jdlrobson (talk) 04:55, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

@Jdlrobson The icon is provided by the wikiminiatlas gadget, and I believe hosted on meta, or toolforge. It is managed by User:Dschwen. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 16:37, 31 May 2024 (UTC)

Question about the "city" parameter (repost)

At what point does the size of the population stop mattering? I have been generally ignoring populations smaller than 10,000 and just entering the unmodified "city" parameter—is this correct? (Reposted from 27 May 2023.) —DocWatson42 (talk) 21:02, 10 September 2024 (UTC)