Category talk:Articles needing the Geo zoom defined

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Swept in from the pub

I added a line to Template:Geo so that, for country/region/huge city articles with no zoom parameter defined, it adds that article to Category:Articles needing the Geo zoom defined, so we can better track and take care of those. Texugo (talk) 14:22, 2 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Great work! (I've been fixing a few countries' zoom levels as I slowly check for $ howlers).
Folks doing this work will often need to change the map centre too, since many use the co-ordinates of the capital and the capital city is rarely in the middle of the country. --W. Frankemailtalk 18:51, 2 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting point. Does that mean that in such cases we can not use Wikidata information? Or should we fix Wikidata information? What is the Wikidata policy on this? Nicolas1981 (talk) 04:14, 3 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
From purely a Wikivoyage perspective, my very loud advice would be to ALWAYS check the co-ordinates are appropriate for what you are trying to achieve and set the zoom level to something appropriate too. Remember that if you don't set a zoom level, that level will currently default to 13 (that default level of 13 may be changed in future, so always best to set a zoom level in our templates). A zoom level of 13 is always going to be inappropriate in a country level article (except perhaps for Monaco or San Marino) so "machine edits" like this one where {{geo|17.066666666667|-88.7}} was added, rather than a more appropriate {{geo|17.2|-88.7|zoom=8}}, so the map would be centred more equidistantly between the northern and southern borders of Belize and show more than just a small patch of jungle when opened or this one, where the dynamic map of the third largest country in the world opens at a high magnification view of the tiny village of Hézuò "City" are perhaps not to be encouraged. --W. Frankemailtalk 13:57, 3 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Checking the ones on my watchlist, I find about half are fine with the default and the others easily fixed.
I also notice that some maps show the old WV logo. Since there is a legal problem with that logo, this should be fixed pronto. Pashley (talk)
Good point. As far as I know, all the maps at [1] still have the old logo. Is it someone at de: that set that all up? Anyone know who to contact? Texugo (talk) 15:15, 3 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
@Nicolas - Wikidata does not store zoom information, so that part is all up to us. As for the centering, I can't imagine why anyone would object to moving the coordinates nearer to the geographic center of any region or country. I have changed a few of them on there myself already, but do not know if there is an official policy. Texugo (talk) 15:19, 3 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Take, for example, Orleans County (New York). This is a county on the northern shore of New York State, meaning it is bordered to the north by Lake Ontario, with Ontario, Canada across the lake. Legally, then, the northern border of Orleans County is in the middle of Lake Ontario, and the geographic coordinates on Wikipedia reflect that. But that definition is silly for a travel guide; we need only show the land area of the county in our maps. So the centerpoint should be considerably farther south for our purposes. That's a case where there's a disconnect between the WP and WV purposes and I don't know how to resolve it. LtPowers (talk) 00:02, 4 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I see your point, but since we are not directly using the wikidata coordinates in our geo tag (so far at least), there is nothing to stop us from setting our center point wherever we need to.
I just used AWB to add coordinates from Wikidata to every article lacking them and for which the respective data item had them, adding geo templates to several thousand articles and bringing our total geo coverage way up to 82% of all destination articles. Basically this means there are two sets of articles we need to focus on: the ones in this category I created above (about 2450 articles), which have coordinates but may need to be adjusted or zoomed, and that other 18% (about 4600 articles) that have no geo info, which probably includes many regions which do not correspond to a wikipedia article, articles which are connected to the wrong wikidata item, etc. Texugo (talk) 01:51, 4 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I imagine we can use WikiData by default, and override as needed for special cases like Orleans County (New York). Nicolas1981 (talk) 05:25, 4 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Well, we can't use Wikidata coordinates automatically by default, not yet at least, because if you have {{geo}} invoke coordinates directly from wikidata, the articles don't get included in the article map, which is why I copied all those coordinates into manually configured geo templates instead of proposing a more automatic solution. I already had a template-based automatic solution all worked out on pt:, but it seems that the article map scrapes the coordinates from the unexpanded source code, so if the coordinates are not physically written there, they don't get used on the map. Texugo (talk) 11:12, 4 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
artmap.php will be modified to extract its data from Wikidata. I think that in the future, {{geo}} should only be used in cases where Wikidata is not appropriate for some reason. Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:40, 5 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Proposal to store zoom level on Wikidata Nicolas1981 (talk) 06:35, 5 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
From the discussion there, it looks like this is resolved with a separate data item? --Inas (talk) 22:12, 24 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]