300:, and I was the liaison person between the Knowledge (XXG) community and getting that recognised by Google for the Knowledge (XXG) layer in its maps. I quickly realised the usefulness of our coordinate data for a multitude of similar and other purposes. I've been involved in adding coordinate features to a number of templates and forging links between our articles and the corresponding entities on OpenStreetMap. I've also been involved in developing methods for displaying lists of coordinates in articles about linear features, such as those in
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Wikidata equivalents) and entities in OSM. For example, a building, lake, road or other feature, about which we have an article has a unique identifier in
Wikidata and a unique identifier in OSM. We have a wonderful opportunity to work with the OSM community (and, indeed, others) to tie those identifiers together; to make clear that they are about the same thing; and to make sure that similar objects are not conflated.
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525:) or through encoding of time data into OpenStreetMap (check out the start_date and end_date tags on buildings for example). To have a map that reflects the status of the world at the time period relevant to the current article, or even to have maps animated with a time slider, displaying changing political borders, glacier melting, drying lakes (
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stations have fewer errors. My bible is Google Earth's satellite photos, supplemented by historicaerials.com for vanished features and Google
Streetview which has good precision in cases where the other sources can correct its baseline errors. Sometimes for local objects I hop on my bike and pedal out there. Sometimes you have to be a noodge.
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575:. Tracking down coordinates for them can be quite entertaining, particularly as a coffee-break distraction from another task. The good news is that we've been doing really quite well at managing the backlog over the last few years, particularly when considered as a proportion of Knowledge (XXG)'s ever increasing size: see
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I'm too much the geomonomaniac to see into any of that. Umm, come to think of it, better integration among
Knowledge (XXG) Mobile, the photographic and geographic aspects of Commons, and Google Maps for Android, would make all of these more useful, especially to me and my quest to illustrate the many
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It's a pain in the butt for anyone not a hardcore coordfreak like me to figure how to make additions or corrections. Offline, graphical programs (I use MS Pro Photo Tools 2) work easily and precisely but online you have to paste or otherwise deal with numbers. Which I do, most every day, because many
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As I said above, the future is data fusion between many disparate sources, and geographical data is just one more way to tie things together. I suspect that the long-term future of the
Knowledge (XXG) geocoding project will be as part of Wikidata -- managing that transition will be a big undertaking
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It's not difficult to add (or to correct) geocoordinates at all. I have done perhaps thousands of them. The difficulty, of course, is in finding accurate sources. When I input a coordinate, I always check the linked-to map to see where it actually goes, because some sources, even "official" ones are
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However, it's still a vast backlog. We could really do with an outreach program to recruit editors to help, particularly those with local knowledge, and to get better interwiki coordination on coordinates-gathering. Although I understand the rationale for not cluttering up articles with maintenance
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Adding coordinates involves adding a template, which probably still is too complicated for the average user. However the preponderance of geographic coordinates on
Knowledge (XXG) demonstrates that we have a sufficient amount of advanced users that are up to the task. For the enduser the coodinates
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Newbies can fix coordinate errors the same as other errors. Click a place you know, and if it's wrong, squawk in Talk. When oldtimers like me don't respond, study the numbers in the locator template and adjust them a few times until the map starts to come out better instead of worse. If this looks
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I see two important, and related, improvements in the near future: the hosting of coordinate data in
Wikidata; and greater integration with OpenStreetMap. The latter will see the use of OSM maps in articles; and closer ties between Knowledge (XXG) articles and items mentioned in articles (or their
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However, I don't think it's
Knowledge (XXG)'s job to provide globally unique identifiers, nor do I think that one single system can accommodate something as blurry as geographical data, which necessarily involves human-created distinctions everywhere. In any case, many people have had a go at this
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Actually I think our biggest challenges are social ones. Despite being around for quite a long time there is still a lack of acceptance towards geographical data coding in some sub-projects. Point data gets removed from articles because the coded objects are line-like (which destroys contributed
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Jim is right: everybody's databases are full of errors, some more than others, and none of them can be trusted all the time on their own without cross-checking with others. Knowledge (XXG) isn't perfect, either, but the more eyes we have on the problem, the more likely errors are to be found and
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We already have crosslinking with OpenStreetMap objects. In our interactive maps OSM objects corresponding to the current article are highlighted. We know Google uses the geotagging information on
Knowledge (XXG) on their maps, and mobile applications, where location based services make a lot of
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It's already useful for finding articles for things near your location, which is fun, and for finding articles for things that are near another article. However, Knowledge (XXG) only has a very simplistic idea of geographical data, essentially just mapping the article to a point, with no idea of
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Associating point coordinates with area-like objects (cities, countries, lakes, etc.) or line-like objects (motorways, rivers, train lines) always has a degree of arbitrariness to it. We have a bunch of conventions on what points to tag, but there is also a lot of controversy with other on-wiki
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I thought that it might make
Knowledge (XXG) more useful, and it might be fun to do. The expectation that coordinates are an essential feature of a well-written article also encourages better fact-checking by editors. I've put in a lot of work on coordinate discovery, data fusion, and bot-based
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tool, which calls itself "the Swiss Army Knife of georeferencing and geotagging". The best way to find this tool is by googling "geolocator swiss army knife", an easy search to remember. The tool uses google earth to help you find the coordinates of the place you want to geotag (you do it by
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Of course sources vary. We have the advantage, for many features, that they can be checked against reliable maps - though this is less easy for historic sites. There is, however, a difference between giving the exact pinpoint location of, say, a small building, and a point that enables a more
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Everybody's databases are full of errors for parks, monuments and prominent buildings. Google landmarks, Bing
Streetside View, NRHP, HMDb, Wikicommons, they all get many things wrong. Sometimes most of those agree and the one that disagrees is right or not as far wrong. Roads and active train
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I've loved maps for over half a century. Road maps, contour maps, rainfall maps, whatever. I always like to know where I'm at and which way I'm looking. This meshes with my interest in astronomy. I tag many pictures and some articles, and know nothing of writing apps or
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I have no idea what this achievement would look like or how to get there. Probably readers get some use in opening an online map to understand the environment of an article, but I've accumulated so many maps in my head that my main use of Wikicoords is to check other
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seem to be hard to discover, or if the user notices them in the article they oftentime do not realize they are more than decoration and come with a lot of functionality, such as interactive maps, and the geohack page with links to dozens of external mapping resources.
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Editors can do three things: learn how to add coordinates to articles; learn to edit Wikidata, and learn to update OpenStreetMap. Once they've done one or more of them, they can contribute to the discussions of how we make and apply the improvements I refer to
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Finally, it would be really good if we could get access to more machine-readable public domain geographical data -- anything which can be done to get database owners to free their data would do a great service not only for Knowledge (XXG), but for the global
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Thank you for that. I was just about to mention the same. The very idea of doing any of this stuff manually makes half of my face twitch. With geolcator it can be a really fun research game... it can get a little addictive though.
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pointing a pointer at the desired place), and then produces the coordinates in a "coord" (or Commons "location") template form that you can copy and paste straight onto a Knowledge (XXG) or Commons page, as appropriate.
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projects which oppose point like tagging of non-point-like features. The collaboration with OpenStreetMap should help. As for reliability of sources, I hope people will got out in the field with their GPS where they can.
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What motivated you to join WikiProject Geographical Coordinates? Do you tend to spend more of your time geotagging articles or working behind the scenes on the templates and applications that provide and use
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How important is the geographical coordinate system used by Knowledge (XXG)? What use does this data have outside Knowledge (XXG)? Is the project anywhere near its goal of establishing a system akin to the
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WikiProject Geographical Coordinates: This week, we plotted out the demarcations of WikiProject Geographical Coordinates, which aims to create a single standard of handling coordinates in Knowledge (XXG)
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Do different databases and mapping services provide conflicting geographic information? Should some sources be trusted more than others? How does the project determine where something is really located?
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is a start, but to broaden the use and improve scalability, the geodata processing and map rendering will have to move from the underpowered toolserver onto Wikimedia Foundation infrastructure.
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Are Knowledge (XXG)'s geographical coordinates easily accessible to the public? How difficult is it to add coordinates to an article? Do the coordinates in articles ever need to be corrected?
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Yes, it can. And it's also important to bear in mind that using this tool isn't original research, but extraction by electronic means of information already published in a reliable source.
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Where do you foresee the future of geographic data heading? What new features would enhance the usefulness of this data? Is the system capable of being adapted to other types of data?
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and other semantic data repositories opens the possibility of making a fantastic geodata resource cross-linked with information that cannot be reduced to geographical terms.
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Wikicoords put a building or other object on the wrong side of a street, and a few that belong in New York or Pennsylvania show up in Kyrgyzstan or Sinkiang. Or Patagonia.
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Adding map resources for historical map data will be immensely useful. For example through reprojection and overlaying of old maps onto contemporary maps (
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yes, it's not uncommon -- I habitually click geocoordinate links when I visit articles for other reasons, just to see whether their coordinates make sense.
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already, with their own private identifiers within their own databases. I'd rather that we participated in some geographical equivalent of
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In my experience, the best way to add coordinates information to Knowledge (XXG) articles (and Commons images) is by using the
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requires them to know that such things exist) would be a really useful feature for this, and many other maintenance projects.
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template that is in use in hundreds of articles and allows to embed complex geodata that can be visualized as map overlays.
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sometimes just flat-out wrong. If I cannot find another source, I will then ignore the bad coordinates and post nothing.
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categories by default, making it easier for casual editors to un-hide/un-fold "hidden categories" on pages (which
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nebulous concept like the area of a battle or the region traversed by a long-distance road, to be found in a map.
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Next week, we'll invade Europe with a well-known WikiProject. Until then, operate within the boundaries of our
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I know about point coordinate templates. Is there something for polygons/regions?
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What are the project's most urgent needs? How can a new member help today?
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I agree with Jim above about fixing things. There are also still
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have the tools for more complex geographical data, such as the
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like fun, join the rest of us who are similarly afflicted.
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has just been launched and new participants are invited
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that at the moment we haven't even begun to address.
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