Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Geographical coordinates/Archive 24

Approximate coordinates for about 500 disused UK railway stations

Based on an idea from Tagishsimon, I've made a list of approximate geographic coordinates for about 500 disused UK railway stations, extracted from the http://www.npemap.org.uk/ URLs linked from those pages: see User:The Anome/npemap.org.uk URLs for the original data, and a sample of converted data. Unfortunately, many of them are up to 1km off from the real coordinates of the station. Would this data be useful for geocoding articles that are currently lacking geographic coordinates? Would anyone be interested in spot-checking some of them to check for systematic errors in my conversions? (Note that my code does take into account geoid conversion: unfortunately, that's minor compared to the built-in errors in the data) -- The Anome (talk) 16:59, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

I have been using npemap.org.uk for exactly this purpose; it is interesting but a little tedious due no doubt to the geoid error you mention. Do you mean that the northings/eastings given in your table do not correspond exactly with the red dots for the station? If so, might it be quicker to get correct northings and eastings by hand, and then use the correct code to go to coord? (Eg for Boscombe, you give 410,91,1 and I easily get (by hand) 411408, 092368; but then their (50.7302, -1.8383) is off in the bushes somewhere.) So if I/we could correct the northings/eastings, could the anome/anomebot then do the rest (convert correctly, tag article)? Occuli (talk) 17:32, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

I've just been talking to Stewart on the Railway WikiProject, who has been adding these links: he has been manually recording the original coordinates as he went. I've asked him to give me a listing of his raw coordinates: I can then easily run them through the coordinate convertor and generate a data file for my article-editing bot. If you have any similar raw data, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could put it on a userpage (in any reasonable format), and I can then parse it and do the same. -- The Anome (talk) 17:40, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks to Occuli and Tagishsimon, 198 of these stations have been geocoded today. Only 27 now remain. -- The Anome (talk) 01:31, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Sadly catscan knows of 500 & more disused UK stations still waiting patiently for their coordinates. A very few of these have the helpful pointers to 1940s OS maps, most have nothing. --Tagishsimon (talk) 02:33, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I've just completed my work on the stations listed by Subterranea Britannica's disused station site: there are about 200 newly geocodable articles for stations in that list. I'm adding them now. We should consider adding a link to the relevant SubBrit page to all these articles. -- The Anome (talk) 03:20, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Excellent work, The Anome. --Tagishsimon (talk) 03:33, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Thank you! It looks like User:Efficacy is adding yet more npemap links to BR stations: does anyone want to ask them if they are interested in capturing the precise coordinates as they do so? Signing off for now, -- The Anome (talk) 03:34, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm willing to help with the project. What do I have to do? I still like the idea of the 1940 maps being the first or most obvious map link available directly from a disused station page.Efficacy (talk) 21:59, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I can understand why you would. Although I've said elsewhere that I think we should be moving away from map links in the external links (think US city articles), in the case of disused stations, the 1940 maps are the only ones which show them. So you have exceptional support from me.

We have a couple of pages, User:The Anome/npemap.org.uk URLs and User:The Anome/Disused UK railway stations still lacking coordinates as of Nov 2008 both listing articles which have no {{coord}}. The latter page probably overlaps the former, and so I would point you to the latter page. What we need for each station is the 6 figure easting & northings which NPE gives you if you click on a location. The Anome has a bot which'll take the article title and the easting & northings, and place a {{coord}} on the page. I think he would also be amenable to putting the NPE external link in, too. So. Add Es & Ns after each station listed in trhe "lacking coordinates" page is what you have to do. I'll drop a note to The Anome about the external links. Many thanks, Efficacy. --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:11, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes, showing the stations is a decisive advantage of the 1940s OS maps over post-Beeching ones. It also makes it more likely that someone with local knowledge will make corrections if necessary (as there are bound to be mistakes when several stations are in view). Occuli (talk) 22:21, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

See User:The Anome/Disused UK railway stations still lacking coordinates for a list of the stations returned by catscan the CatScan search above. If anyone is interested in using the npemap.org.uk system to add "easting, northing" values to the ends of the lines in that page, I'll be happy to use my bot to geocode those articles. -- The Anome (talk) 11:39, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Given eastings/northings, could your bot also add an external links line with the relevant npemap (this is IMO more useful than the up-to-date maps)? (I've added 3 - I'm now more likely to follow a particular railway line rather than work alphabetically.) Occuli (talk) 15:14, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I note that whilst I support this action in the short term, the preferable approach would be to put NPEMAP into geohack such that all UK articles can be directed to the 1940 OS map. Ideally IMO we should be moving away from promoting a single map source in external links towards offering the fullest choice through geohack. --Tagishsimon (talk) 15:51, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Done! See #Geohack - UK - New Popular Edition Maps above. --Para (talk) 18:35, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Glitch in coord template

Hi guys

I wonder if someone with knowledge of this template could take a look at Template_talk:Coord#N/S and E/W display for decimals and Template_talk:Coord#Formatting problems and figure out what can be done about this problem. I'm raising it here because I don't think the template talk page sees much traffic. Thanks! Matt 23:15, 17 November 2008 (UTC). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.134.30.74 (talk)

WILL THIS PLEASE BE ADDRESSED BY SOMEONE ???? Cush (talk) 12:22, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Participant welcome

I've begun a participant welcome template at User:Spencer/Geo welcome template. It has an auto sig and header, and all it needs is to be subst'ed. Feel free to change the wording. I've used it on three new participants so far. Spencer^T♦C 03:22, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

what geo type is an underwater geologic feature?

In adding {{coord}} to Cobb hotspot, I was stumped by the type of point to give. type:landmark seems wrong, but so does type:waterbody. Is there something more appropriate for an underwater feature? What about sunken shipwrecks, seamounts, etc.? —EncMstr (talk) 07:02, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

We do seem to have a motley collection of type parameters & could do with putting some time into revising the list. That said, I have no immediate suggestion for the naming of Cobb. And there's always the tension between granularity of the list and its length.

There are a number of other improvements needed to geohack apart from type. It's vaguely on my todo list to try to summarise these, have a discussion here, and then see if we can get magnus (?) to implement them. --Tagishsimon (talk) 17:38, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Why do we need a "type" parameter? What is it used for? Would "magnitude" (i.e. 1 metre, 10 metre, 100m, 1km, 10km, 100km, etc.) or something similar suffice? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 16:40, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

I use it to select the appropriate marker icons for articles in the WikiMiniAtlas. --Dschwen 16:57, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

In that case, I think we need a "misc" type. Is there a page where you list the current types and show the respective icons? Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 20:45, 20 November 2008 (UTC)

Sort of meta:WikiMiniAtlas/en. Countries get no symbol, but bold print (and I'm thinking of similar layout for adm1st and adm2nd). If you look on the map you will notice that most US towns are either typed as landmarks or as tiny cities (as they are missing the population number). This is currently driving me nuts, but I've already posted about this... --Dschwen 02:29, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

"Landmark" should be as appropriate for an underwater landmark as it is for a mountain top surrounded by air or the location of a destroyed dam. When altitude can be specified then we'll be able to distinguish between a mountain top, a tunnel through the mountain, the surface of the ocean, or a mountain in the ocean. -- SEWilco (talk) 00:24, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

← Note also the XZ region code, used for objects in/above international waters. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 12:03, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

{{coord}} and page timeouts

I had a go at replacing the {{coord *}} tags in the UK Gazetteer pages -- which are the last few users of these tags -- with my bot, but unfortunately editing these pages in that way causes page timeouts. (see Special:Contributions/The_Anomebot2) Does anyone know the maximum safe number of entries that can be accommodated using a combination of {{coord}} and the other templates in these pages? Is it even worth the bother of fixing this? -- The Anome (talk) 22:52, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Some of the pages already changed cause problems as well. Should we not be looking at retaining the templates that are light on processing rather then changing all articles over to {{coord}} which is rather heavyweight for most applications. May be {{Coord}} can be slimmed down or the other templates be retained. Keith D (talk) 00:17, 23 November 2008 (UTC)

Given the extra functionality offered by {{coord}}, it would be better to subdivide those pages. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 22:53, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Should events be given coords?

Should events which occurred in a specific location be given coordinates? For example the Abraham Lincoln assassination or the Battle of Jenin. I initially leaned towards not as it seemed more functional to just state the location for the event in the page (for example, Ford's Theater or Jenin), and then make sure the page for the location had coordinates. Looking through various articles though I can find no clear mandate. What do people think? --Bachrach44 (talk) 18:14, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Many events already have coordinates. Personally, I'd add coordinates for those that can be localized, e.g. "Yellowstone fires of 1988", but not "2008".

In the current list of types (WP:GEO#type:T), there is none that could be applicable to this. I'd suggest to create, possibly "type:event". -- User:Docu

Need help with infoboxes

I have a major gripe with the {{Infobox_Settlement}} infobox. The coordinate link it creates contains a type:city parameter without the population in braces. This should be really easy to fix. Ommission of the population number makes it impossible for me to correctly choose a marker icon bases on the size of the city for the WikiMiniAtlas. Furthermore large cities cannot be displayed with higher priority on the Map without knowledge of the population. This looks ridiculous! Unfortunately I'm not an admin on this project, so I cannot fix it myself. And the last time I made such a request on the template's talk page nobody reacted. --Dschwen 22:38, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

Infobox Settlement has additional parameters which do not (last I checked) appear in the examples and predate most of the bot usages in articles.

| coordinates_display = inline,title

| coordinates_type = type:type_region:whatever_source:whence_from

For example

| coordinates_display = inline,title

| coordinates_type = type:city(568380)_region:US-OR_source:gnis-1136645

—EncMstr (talk) 23:02, 24 November 2008 (UTC)

These are pretty much irrelevant. It would need just one change to the template to fix thousands of articles. The population should be appended to type:city by default. There isn't really much to discuss about. --Dschwen 00:09, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

I tried to do this in the past (see Template_talk:Infobox_Settlement#Coordinates:_type:city(#)_and_population_total), but at least for "population total", the values of the field would need to be cleaned up first, possibly split in several fields. -- User:Docu

WikiMiniAtlas RFC

Since there is absolutely zero progress with the database dumps I have extracted a new set of coordinates from the db myself. Currently I have only done this for the english language labels. I'll need some feedback though. A new feature is the display of named coordinates (for example see List of TVOntario transmitters). Those occur mainly in list articles and will now be displayed with their (hopefully) sensible names (instead of List of TVOntario transmitters). The internal display priority weighting is adjusted to make these list coordinates appear with low priority and the label text will be italicized.

Furthermore I blacklisted labels with certain Prefixes. There should be no lables reading List of , History of , Geography of on the map (note that if the name/title attribute is used labels with a different text, but linking to a list article will appear anyways!). I could use further suggestions for blacklist prefixes.

Thirdly, something has still to be done about {{Infobox Settlement}}. Now that I can extract up to date coordinates fixing the city type to include the population would instantly improve the WMA. --Dschwen 17:51, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

as a side note, this has increased the number of labels on the en WMA from 180000 to 530000! --Dschwen 17:54, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

I made another change. Town labels are stripped of county and state. This reduces map clutter significantly. --Dschwen 20:54, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

I haven't looked at the miniatlas for some time, mostly because of the clutter factor. That looks like a considerable improvement.

Just by chance, when inspecting another article, I noticed that you've got coordinates for Venera 10, placing it in the Carribbean, when actually it's on Venus. If you ignore all geotags with the "globe:" parameter set to a value other than "Earth", you should be able to exclude these. I've got a list somewhere in my userspace of other extraterrestrial articles which should have their "globe:" parameters set, if not done already. -- The Anome (talk) 02:56, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I think I saw Olympus Mons somewhere in the Pacific (?) :-). That is an easy thing to check in any case. --Dschwen 03:17, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

more type parameter insanities

Henning, Illinois has the type:landmark?! Geez! Another Infobox to fix. It should have type:city(241). I cannot believe that such an obvious large scale gaffe has been left unchanged for so long now. --Dschwen 20:56, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Welcome to wikipedia. And anyway, that's quite a restrained US city article with only 4 coordinates based on three input instances. No overkill there, then. It sucks. --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:01, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Those articles are well overdue for cleanup: removing the redundant tags looks like a job for a carefully constructed bot to me. Unfortunately, I haven't got the time or resources to do it at the moment. -- The Anome (talk) 03:10, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Difficult coords questions

I am working with WikiProject Alabama and am adding coords to the articles in that category. What about very large, ill-defined articles such as obsolete congressional districts, large rivers or large regions. Should these receive coords and if so is there any guidance on placing them? If not, should we just delete the coords missing template? Thanks! JodyB _talk 16:06, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

It's an easier problem than deciding on coordinates for Alabama (33°0′N 86°40′W)! Of course, if someone wants to know precisely where XYZ district was, a single coordinate isn't going to do it, but it's still useful for a general idea of its location. The key points are: 1) use a precision of about ten percent of the size of the feature, 2) cite it with a footnote or explain your reasoning in a wikicomment so other editors can understand and check your work.

By convention, the primary coordinate of a river is at its mouth; an additional point may be at its source. See {{Infobox River}}. —EncMstr (talk) 17:26, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

And as for how to do the footnotes, because they won't work in the coord template, see the discussion above about verifiability, and Russian Monument (Liechtenstein) for an example of one way to do them.Travisl (talk) 23:12, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

I wonder if mapmakers make a science out of placing the location of a country name or state name. Does it really matter, where the coordinate for Alabama is located, as long as it is pointing more or less centraly on the territory? --Dschwen 23:36, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

It's both an art and a science. See http://www.google.com/search?q=map+label+placement for a wide variety of sources regarding this, including this introduction to the topic, and our own Automatic label placement article. -- The Anome (talk) 19:17, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Re-sorting U.S. {{coord missing}} articles by state

I've now sorted most of the 19,000+ articles formerly in Category:United States articles missing geocoordinate data into their respective per-state categories, using a variety of heuristics based on analyzing category names. About 700 600 articles could not easily be sorted by the bot, for a variety of reasons, and remain to be hand-sorted. -- The Anome (talk) 21:02, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Excellent. Well done & thanks. You'll have noted that I did the outreach yesterday night. And good work on the disused railway stations; they seem to be progressing nicely. --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:11, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

If you're interested, for the 700 remaining, you'll get a significant few done if you merely look for the state name within the article title. --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:13, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

And I'm a little uncertain: why at Category:United States articles missing geocoordinate data do some of the subcats show up as visible subcategories, and some show only as hidden. I cannot immediately spot what's driving this difference. --Tagishsimon (talk) 21:16, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

The Mediawiki category-display paging code grabs the next up-to-200 pages belonging to a category indiscriminately, without regard to whether they are article pages or sub-categories, then sorts and displays them. You can see that the # of articles and # of subcategories on each page (except the last) always adds up to 200. -- The Anome (talk) 22:52, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Freakin awesome. Makes things a lot easier - thanks. --Bachrach44 (talk) 21:18, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

There are now only 122 articles left in Category:United States articles missing geocoordinate data. I think all the rest need to be sorted by hand, either into the appropriate U.S. state category, or by removing the tag if the article is not actually about a sanely geolocatable entity, or -- in a very few cases -- filed with multiple {{coord missing}} tags if it covers more than one state. Would anyone like to help finish sorting them? -- The Anome (talk) 19:03, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Down to 20, mostly multi-state articles. Which reminds me: tagging these with a single coordinate is not very useful at all. We really do need a settled means of giving a number of coordinates. Can we not have an expanding section of text in the top right, which, like expanding & contracting templates, would give the user a list of coords? --Tagishsimon (talk) 20:27, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks! Yes, we should be able to define bounding boxes, like Wikimapia does.

Which brings me to the scale: parameter. "scale" implicitly assumes that the map is a particular physical size, and that we should select a map of the correct scale so that a "map-sized" chunk of it contains both the feature itself and enough of its surrounding to establish context. But this does not work in a variable-resolution world. The scale required to show a feature on a 50" display is completely different from the scale needed to show it on a smartphone display; moreover, the number of pixels needed to achieve that scale is completely different depending of the dots-per-inch used by that display.

What's needed is a "size" parameter that gives the approximate diameter of the object, so that a map can be generated that covers the entire object and its surroundings, regardless of the size of the display. This is particularly true when using scalable representations such as SVG: using "size" actually makes the calculations easier. Unlike the ideas of "scale" or "zoom ratio", "size" is a concrete physical quantity, with the dimension of length. Size is also easier to understand and measure: a small building might be 20m across, a huge building 500m across, a small village 2 or 3km across, a metropolitan region 100km across.

The combination of a size: parameter, and specifying a center point, should be able to deal adequately with many of the cases you refer to above. It can also help with determining size for labels. -- The Anome (talk) 22:45, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

New U.S. geodata source!

See http://www.transtats.bts.gov/DL_SelectFields.asp?Table_ID=1180 for an apparently-public-domain U.S. Federal Government source of coordinates and other data for ~1500 U.S. transport terminals, including, but not limited to, railway stations and airports. -- The Anome (talk) 01:14, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Redirects

There are redirects such as Tavistock South railway station which are at present usefully categorised. Now this station has a location so is it worth asking whether we can add coord to a redirect? (I tried this earlier but a bot deletes text in redirects.) Occuli (talk) 17:42, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

It should be on the redirect target, where readers can use it to see where the station is/was. --NE2 17:49, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Indeed, but then it will be one of many locations in the target and google etc cannot then 'harvest' the coordinates easily. Whereas a redirect has a unique name. Occuli (talk) 18:16, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

Our first priority is to our readers, not to Google. --NE2 18:49, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm not sure for practical purposes why multiple {{coord}} on a page should defeat Google. If the name= parameter is used, each coord can be identified on the map. It may be that google is not choosing to take coordinates from pages with multiple coords - does anyone know? But I think it incumbent on them to fix that issue, if it exists, rather than for us to tag redirect pages. I recognise that it can be argued that tagging redirects would be an innovative and arguably useful thing to do, but it feels like undesirable feature creep to me; I tend to think that coords should stay with their content. --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:54, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

I agree. This is exactly what the name parameter is there for. -- The Anome (talk) 23:03, 27 November 2008 (UTC)

But if a given location X occurs (named) on several pages, there will be several competing possibilities for the coords of X. Tavistock South railway station is linked from 8 different pages and could be given 8 different (slightly, or very different) locations on the 8 pages. Occuli (talk) 11:05, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

That's a good point. But if google was sucking up the coords, it could deduplicate them by name. Of course if there were variations in the name, then they'd still get multiple instances each listed against a variant. I think, though, that we're speculating on how a third party might approach a problem that they might not approach: there's no more certainty that they'd decide to use coords on redirects. --Tagishsimon (talk) 11:40, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

As an example, if we go to Alabama and then wikimapia (click blue globe in title) there are multiple labels for a hurricane, and also for Feasting on Asphalt. As a less extreme example, wikimapia for York (Layerthorpe) railway station shows a suburb of Coventry on the A1 north-west of York - one does wish to have exactly one source for each label so corrections can be made in just 1 place. (We were led to believe that google was using coord with display=title but not otherwise. I'm not sure what was happening about infoboxes using coord indirectly via lat= etc.) Occuli (talk) 12:36, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm currently working hard on a new coordinate extraction scheme for the WikiMiniAtlas (or blue globe as some people call it :-) ). Name parameters have to be chosen sensibly. Coordinates on redirect pages are a no no. We have to put some energy into improving the quality of coordinated data where we have more than one coordinate per page. A terrible example are all Countiy pages for Kansas List_of_counties_in_Kansas, the all include lists of townships with coordinates, all unnamed, and all showing up under the county name on the map. Crap! Also pages like Feasting on Asphalt are junk coordinate-wise. Your help is appreciated in adding names to the coordinates on these pages! The current weighting scheme makes names coordinates appear with a smaller priority than unnamed coordinates. This should help in finding unnamed lists of coordinates for now. I'm working on making the display priority of coordinates antiproportional to the total number of coordinates on the page they link to. Anyhow, bottom line: please help adding names to unnamed inline coordinates! --Dschwen 04:51, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

The best way to fix the two examples you mention would be to mark up each table row (using a template if desired), with a column for coordinates (as already in the latter) as an hCard microformat, then extract the "fn" property as the name on Wikimapia. Unfortunately, we seem to be saddled with the sub-optimal, duplicate and hidden name property in {{coord}} (issues as described, passim) and no capability or incentive to to include other hCard properties such as the creation date (as "bday"), county code (as "nickname"), notes, etc. I will say "I told you so" (though not necessarily you personally). Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 18:56, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Ok, I know how you feel about microformats, and yes, they are great. But this is not about Wikimapia. And microformats are impractical for my endeavour. To extract data from microformat properties I'd have to parse the full Wikipedia text data. This data is not easily available on the Toolserver, and parsing it would require days, if not weeks. My approach is using the data which I have available on on the Toolserver database mirror, namely the externallinks database table. It contains coordinate data in the form of GeoHack links, and can be extracted and parsed in a matter of minutes (and it is alway up to date). So, while I agree, that it is not the most elegant approach, it is the only one that actually works. --Dschwen 20:11, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Funny: I thought your issue here was that it's not working ("a terrible example", "Crap!", "junk coordinate-wise", etc.). Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 01:10, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes, quite apparently you did not understand the issue then. My agitated comments after fixing tons of badly geocoded articles do not have much to do with the issue. If you cannot help I suggest you just leave it be then and let me do my work. Thanks. --Dschwen 01:39, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

On the contrary: I understand - and predicted - it, quite well. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 17:44, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

For those who would like to help in adding names; I put up a simple query to list all articles with over three unnamed coordinates: tools:~para/cgi-bin/coord_unnamed. --Para (talk) 02:22, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, this is great! Another useful query would be for articles with a negative longitude and a W direction postfix (resulting in a most likely unintended eastern hemisphere location). --Dschwen 02:33, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Oh, and in case you are wondering why some of these do not appear on the WMA, I already blacklisted the worst list articles (that goes only for the unnames coords, once they are named they will appear on the WMA). --Dschwen 02:40, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

I made a regexp query at commons:Commons talk:Geocoding/Archive 1#broken_coordinates once, and it seems to work fine here too: tools:~para/cgi-bin/coord-geocodingerrors. I added a check for the hemisphere mismatch as well, and about 10% of the ~700 errors consist of those. --Para (talk) 03:21, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Wikimapia marks a surprising number of railway stations in the North Sea. (This is sometimes due to a confusion between E/W and +/- in coord.) Occuli (talk) 18:42, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

You are probably talking about the WikiMiniAtlas, and yes it is most likely a result of the confusion of east and west (unless I don't know about the Undersea Railway in the North Sea). You are welcome to help out in fixing this. I'm currently updating the WikiMiniAtlas several times a day, so it will only take a few hours to see the results of your corrections. --Dschwen 20:15, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I do mean WikiMiniAtlas ... blue globe might be the way to go. There was even a railway accident under the North Sea, and a Canadian town in Holland. Occuli (talk) 13:50, 30 November 2008 (UTC)

Sssssh! The North Sea Undersea Railway was meant to be a closely guarded secret. Now you've gone and told everyone about it... -- The Anome (talk) 02:19, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Naw, old news: Transatlantic tunnel. —EncMstr (talk) 02:36, 1 December 2008 (UTC)