Template talk:GeoGroup

What am I doing wrong

The map created from List of eponymous roads in London has numbers for all but two of the coords rendered on the map. I'm somewhat stumped. Would someone advise where I went wrong. thanks--Tagishsimon (talk) 01:16, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

At the moment I see three coords on that page with a Name parameter instead of name, and since template parameter names are case sensitive, they don't show up. Another part of what you saw is because Google caches the data it retrieves for some minutes. You must have looked at the Google view before doing the edits, then quickly putting them through and on checking again, got the same cached view as before, with the original two named coords. This is probably a common scenario, though I don't know how long on average it takes people to enter the names and how long Google caches things. Rapid refreshing may possibly even extend their cache period. Perhaps a timestamp should be added to the top of the list (the only place possible), or would the use of UTC confuse people who have localised the times Wikipedia shows? --Para (talk) 09:25, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. I've amended the three Names. Not sure if that was it or if it was a cache problem (my actions were as you surmised - look, edit, look, &c.), as you suggest, but today it all works. Excellent. --Tagishsimon (talk) 09:44, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

What I may suggest is you add the following string to your Google Maps query: "&refresh=" followed by a random number. This will bypass Google's cache. --  Denelson83  17:36, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Usage help, or maybe an enhancement request

A couple of months ago, I saw the kml template added to Nanboku Line (Sendai). After reading about the template today (I guess I'm a slow reader?), I noticed it could be used on categories. So, after I added it to Category:Sendai City Subway Line an annoying problem surfaced: since the coords are included in a table in the main article, and again in each individual station article, the map reference comes up with two sets of coords for each station. So, is there a better way to use the template that prevents this? Or, would it be possible to add some sort of markup like {{kml-category-off}} for articles like Nanboku Line (Sendai) so that when the category is parsed, those coords are skipped? Or, another approach might be a parameter inside the template on the category page which lists pages that are to be ignored when scanning the cat? Thanks! Neier (talk) 12:17, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

I've changed that to use {{GeoGroupTemplate|article=Nanboku Line (Sendai)}}. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 12:29, 29 December 2008 (UTC)

Hmmm. I guess that will work for now; but, things would get messy once there is more than one "index" articles in each category. And, it sorta defeats the whole purpose of having the category be recursively monitored if only a single article is relied on. Neier (talk) 09:14, 30 December 2008 (UTC)

You are actually pointing to a much deeper issue here: Do we want redundant geocoding with data from individual articles being duplicated in list articles? This has been giving me a headache for a while now. Glad you brought it up. --Dschwen 21:15, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes, that's why I was hoping there was an "ignore" parameter as it would avert a long discussion. :-)

I can see points for and against. For lists with many missing articles, it is nice. For lists which are contained in a category, it is redundant and harder to maintain; and, if I was writing a bot to parse the codes, having multiple (and, likely different) coordinates for the same place would cause many headaches. I guess I'm mostly on the side that they aren't needed in lists; but, I'm not real involved with the geo tag projects, so, take that advice with a large grain of salt. Neier (talk) 13:17, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

Point out of Place

The Map of All Coordinates link this template produces at the bottom of the table in the Vancouver Island Ranges article works nicely except that it produces one spurious location for Golden Hinde (mountain) off in China somewhere rather than on Vancouver Island. I have hunted through the code and can't figure out why. Could someone have a look? It is probably one of those things another set of eyes will pick out right away. --KenWalker | Talk 21:21, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Seems fine now. Oosoom ^Talk 09:45, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Problem with multiple tables

I'm using the French version of this Template. When an article has its coordonates all in one table, the template works fine. However, when there is two or more tables with coordonates, Google gives "errors in data" fomr kmltool. Any idea of the cause and how to make the call to kmltool work on multiple table articles ? Pierre cb (talk) 20:07, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

It's actually not about multiple tables. With fr:Liste de tripoints Google Maps was having trouble with the é in the Amérique heading. It was sent as U+00E9 and Google refused to parse the data, but when sent as U+C3A9, it works. According to UTF-8#Description, only the 7-bit ASCII printable characters are allowed when content-type is said to be UTF8, and everything else needs to be in the longer format. Google is not enforcing that very well though, as they require ASCII encoding for document titles even when the entire document is supposed to be in UTF8. Oh well, the output should be to their liking now. --Para (talk) 21:49, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the info but how do you force the ASCII table in an article ? 70.52.11.52 (talk) 00:23, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, Wikipedia transfers all its content in UTF8, so as long as the text in an article looks fine in your browser, you don't need to worry about encoding. The kmlexport tool however needs to do some conversion to provide the data to Google and things can go wrong sometimes, so please report any further problems here. --Para (talk) 01:03, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

If quite frustating in fact. klmexport works on some article and other are refused (like fr:Liste des volcans d'Afrique) for no apparent reason in the coding. Only the multiple tables seemed the common denominator but you ahve proved that iti is not. Is there a utility program to check the ASCII interpretation problem that diagnose and correct the files sent to Google ? Pierre cb (talk) 01:24, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Ah, that's again another issue the people editing this template had some trouble with in the beginning, and in that case you do have to delve into encoding, though this time not in ASCII but nested urlencoding. On the French Wikipedia the article parameter in the link is currently article%3DListe%2Bdes%2Bvolcans%2Bd%2526%252339%253BAfrique. If you go to the English Wikipedia page of the same name and preview {{GeoGroupTemplate}} there, the parameter is article%3DListe_des_volcans_d%252527Afrique. It was indeed incredibly frustrating to get it right, and the only advice I can give you is to duplicate the encoding from this template. Maybe allowing Google to show "file not found" is not the best error message to relay Wikipedia's 404 Not Found message though... --Para (talk) 01:54, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

Coordinate duplicated

If {{Coord}} is used with "|display=inline,title" to delineate the primary article coordinate (e.g. The Lone Sailor), then kmlexport produces two copies of the coordinate. I'm aware there is some debate about Coord displaying two places, however I don't think anyone would debate kmlexport only including it once. I suppose if kmlexport is just scraping the geo microformats, then it is really Coord that needs fixing to emit only one. However I'll start asking here. --J Clear (talk) 00:17, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

So much information in duplicated in Wikipedia articles, for summary style, ease of access, consistency, etc. In most cases it probably doesn't matter to a normal reader if an article has duplicate coordinates. I however can't think of a situation where the duplicates would be interesting in an exported list of coordinates, except maybe when the duplicates are in different sections, grouped differently or something. I modified the tool to remove duplicates within sections. So far that's only exact duplicates, and there are probably articles which give the same coordinates in different formats that the tool won't prune. I don't know if it's possible to detect that from cases where an article mentions things very very close to each other. --Para (talk) 01:09, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

It looks like you covered the case I was concerned with, thanks. Although if my surmise is right, you're covering for a bug elsewhere. And yeah, I just edited Marietta, Ohio to prune three different Coord entries for the town down to the infobox one. --J Clear (talk) 04:06, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

Good good, WP:USCITY#Geography has already been updated to no longer encourage all that redundancy typical to US articles. The effects of the previous guideline will probably continue to be visible for quite a while, for example in one of the categories that article is in, United States colonial and territorial capitals.

Removing the duplicate markup from the Coord template might be difficult without redesigning the template structure, as the inline,title bit just does a double transclusion of the template where the additional spans and classes are added. But that's not a problem here as the kmlexport tool doesn't parse microformats. --Para (talk) 14:10, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

GeoRSS

I've seen there is a section above about getting no data with the option GeoRSS. Is there any correction to that problem in the future as I get this response too ?Pierre cb (talk) 22:28, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

The format doesn't seem to have had much interest, but reading up on it, it would allow showing Wikipedia data in Microsoft Live Maps and Yahoo Maps. To replace the broken Suda tool, Microsoft has an online KML to GeoRSS converter, which can give GeoRSS of fr:Liste de tripoints, or even a Live Search Maps view of fr:Liste de tripoints. This might be worth adding to the various templates, as aerial imagery from Live Maps is often better than that from Google. --Para (talk) 01:07, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I think I will add the second one. Pierre cb (talk) 04:23, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Me too, the bird's eye imagery in urban areas and easy navigation between the points is possibly the coolest option ever! (No I don't work for them :)) --Para (talk) 11:09, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Expansion of nested geographical information

I notice that the kmlexport script already handles nested categories, is there a way to add the nesting level to this template, so that Category:Castles in England could show all the positions of the castles in its county subcategories. Discretion would be needed to avoid huge data volumes. Vicarage (talk) 06:29, 7 May 2009 (UTC)

I'm interested in this as well. See Categories_and_geo_coordinates 118.208.97.169 (talk) 20:07, 21 September 2009 (UTC)

Why only these two geo services? Why not others too?

• Mapquest?
• maps.yahoo.com?

etc? CaribDigita (talk) 17:12, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

The current versions of those sites and their APIs require someone to set up a "map holder" page somewhere, possibly personally register with the provider to be able to use maps on the page, maintain the page, and then have people use that page for their mapping needs instead of the provider's own site. It's been a bit much for anyone interested so far, but maybe there's some Wikipedian somewhere who doesn't mind doing it? Like Google and Live Search, Yahoo seems to have a similar way in their "no programming" V1 API to visualise remote collections by URL, but I can't see it working with any example on the net (all of which are from 2005!) other than Yahoo's own. So not high expectations there, and even if it worked, Yahoo fans probably don't much like the V1 interface anymore. --Para (talk) 18:07, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Long-list-warning option needed

There are numerous list-articles of historic sites listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places which have more than 200 coordinates. I understand that the LiveSearch / Bing maps don't display more than 200, just cutting off what is displayed with no notice. I wonder about a partial remedy being an option for this GeoGroupTemplate to display a warning message regarding that. Perhaps display "Bing map displays just first 200 coordinates". The Bing maps at least appear reliably, generated on the fly. The Google maps for large lists do not appear reliably. I know that if you click on the Google map link for a large list it will often show a message like "map not available", but if you come back a few times and try again hours later, often the map will then work. Some comment about this would be helpful too. If/when the Bing or Google map systems capabilities change, then the long-list-warning message could be changed here, centrally. I don't anticipate there is any way for the long-list-warning to be displayed automatically only for articles having more than 200 coordinates, is there? A manually set warning, to be called by something like {{GeoGroupTemplate|long-list-warning=yes}} would be easy to set up, I think. Could that be done, please? doncram (talk) 18:24, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Further, actually what GeoGroupTemplate displays is "Map of all coordinates from Google / Map of all coordinates from Bing". This is a false promise in cases where there are more than 200 coordinates, as they are not all displayed by Bing. doncram (talk) 18:28, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

One example in mainspace of an article where Bing map displays, but fails to note that it has cut off at 200 places, is National Register of Historic Places listings in Detroit, Michigan. I'm working on another big list, not yet in mainspace, at Wikipedia:WikiProject World Heritage Sites/Tables of WHS Sites EUR region. Is there any possibility of this long-list-warning feature being implemented? Does anyone else see a need here? doncram (talk) 17:37, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

If the links in the template are changed to the redirect format (→toolserver→query→map instead of the current →map→toolserver→query→map), it would be possible to implement an automatic warning in the tool, shown for some seconds or requiring acknowledgment. It would also get rid of the "map not available" problem, which happens when the map service thinks the tool takes too long to respond. Another perhaps dirtier way would be to add the message in the kml data some way, in the description maybe if that's displayed by the services, and only show it when it's called by one of the supported services and the placemarks exceed the limit of the service. I think coding such warnings in Wikipedia articles would be very ugly, unless done on-view with Javascript. Actually, since all the services require Javascript for showing placemarks anyway, a script on Wikipedia could replace this template entirely and do all the above... --Para (talk) 17:51, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Parameters and looking pretty

I hate myself for doing this post as it is against all my principles to comment on formatting- but It probably should be addressed. It should be for the user to decide the format of the box.

Maps of all the points used in this article
Google	Bing

Maps of all the points used in this article

Google

Bing

Location of all the features

Google

Bing

I can think of situations where I would want to include the link, in navbox format, from within an info box, in the external links with commons cat. Shade should be selectable to fit in with the colour scheme of the controlling Wikiproject Or to allow the user to set the css in monobook. Maybe we need to provide the following parameters

• text
• width
• rows
• tablestylestring

Or there again I may be wrong. --ClemRutter (talk) 21:00, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

As colors are likely to be large topic to discussion, I'd rather use one of the standard interface colors. The usual placement of the template is with the sister links at the bottom of an article or on category pages. In a few cases, it's also used at the beginning of an article. For articles, some of the links can also be reached from the map sources pages, but it isn't easy to find. BTW there are more than two links included in the template. -- User:Docu 11:09, 2 July 2009 (UTC)

Colors

Is there a way to have multiple colors on the map, if for example I want to differenciate 2 lists of points on a single page? Maybe adding a color parameter to Coord?

Gonioul (talk) 12:38, 1 September 2009 (UTC)

Possibly... But we have to remember that coordinates are used in many applications, and so far all the information given in the coordinate templates has been about the location only. I don't think mixing in information about their context would be good, especially as there can be more than one. If the template and tool supported it, fixing coord with a colour or an icon might confuse people when they view the data from another starting point than the article author intended.

Icons have been used on some wiki related maps so far: Wikipedia-World uses category based (I think) icons on Google Earth, and the kmlexport tool on one of the Norwegian Wikipedias is linked to an object type when this template is applied: see cities, mountains or churches.

What might work, is assigning each coord to a group, and then defining the style of the group somewhere, like is done with CSS. Or if sections are enough for the grouping, just have some invisible template in the section define the style. Then it would be clear that the information applies to that group or section only, and something that uses data from multiple articles wouldn't have to pay attention to it.

In the end though, the kml will have to contain the url of an icon, as the icon color property in kml is only supported by Google Earth. But it might still be implemented in the style definition as a colour, which then affects the actual icon depending on the map service used (as most of them have icons in different style). The problem is that in any case it will have to specifically set the icon and the user then has no way to return to the default icon of the service. That can be a problem with, say, a volcano icon that's very different from the default.

Anyway, up to the community to find how such a thing would be done on the wiki side. --Para (talk) 17:03, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Lists

There are a number of lists whose members have geograpic coordinates. For example:

• List of National Trust properties in England
• List of schools in Lincolnshire

I really like the way that this template reacts with categories, parsing the members for coordinates.

Would it be possible to do the same thing with lists?--Brunnian (talk) 22:32, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

The tool used by this template can handle this case, see map of articles linked from "List of National Trust properties in England" or map of articles linked from "List of schools in Lincolnshire". The template would need to be adapted, somehow. --Para (talk) 09:44, 6 September 2009 (UTC)

I've used those on those two links. Thanks. The problem is that two of the links on the second one are not to schools, but to 'Lincolnshire' and 'England' (london). This spoils the impact a bit. Does the tool include an 'exclude' option?--Brunnian (talk) 11:09, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

A better approach might be to convert those lists tp tables, with columns for coordinates, plus images, locality, etc. Otherwise they're redundant to categories. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 12:05, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

other mapping formats

I've been adding the kml template to various county pages from List of abbeys and priories in England - Cornwall, Devon, so far so good. But when I get to List of monastic houses in Somerset I'm stumped - the previous editor has used OSGB map references, with gbmapping template and others have used oscoor - is it possible to use them with the kml technique? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Brunnian (talk • contribs) 22:38, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

No, it needs to use {{Coord}}, with WGS84 coordinates. Coord's documentation explains what to do. Thank you for adding this template to other articles. Andy Mabbett (User:Pigsonthewing); Andy's talk; Andy's edits 23:28, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Problems with geo-coded images on Commons

(I'm posting this here as I suspect there'll be more users with the required expertise here than on Commons). I'm currently going through my images on Commons, tagging them with {{Location dec}}. These display ok in Google Maps when I click on the file link (e.g. [1]), however when I try to use the GeoGroupTemplate on Commons for these images, only those images which do not have a heading show up ([2]). They are all listed in the left hand panel, but most do not have an icon on the map. Is the problem a) with the way I'm tagging them, b) with the Location dec template, c) with the GeoGroupTemplate, or d) with Google? Any help or advice would be appreciated. —  Tivedshambo  (t/c) 17:59, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

First option should have been to blame one of the tools when they give different results with the same data. The bug seems to have been introduced to numeric headings when I was working on commons:Commons talk:Geocoding#Category maps couple of days ago. Fixed now, thanks for noticing. --Para (talk) 19:45, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

Great - thanks. —  Tivedshambo  (t/c) 22:51, 23 September 2009 (UTC)

other language categories

Seems like kmlexport doesn't work with french wiki categories, I don't know for other wikis...

Please check fr:Catégorie:Zone 1 des transports en commun d'Île-de-France

Gonioul (talk) 22:22, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

I fixed some ascii vs utf8 confusion and it should work now. --Para (talk) 08:04, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! - Gonioul (talk) 08:56, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

A user script to generate a map tab for every page

After realising how long it might take to add the template to every category I'm interested in, I wondered if I could automatically add the functionality to every page using a user script. And indeed if you modify your monobook.js file (as described in Wikipedia:WikiProject_User_scripts/Scripts) to have

importScript('User:Vicarage/maptab.js');

You should get a 'map' tab at the top of the page that uses the toolserver approach to generate a Google Map on the fly. I'm not a Javascript or Wikipedia internals expert, so I expect the approach is not bulletproof, but I'd be interested in people's comments. Vicarage (talk) 19:15, 24 October 2009 (UTC)

kml template

At "Category:California ranchos" the template:kml for Bing only lists/maps the first 200 entries (Google maps all). I note that there are only 200 entries on the 1st page of "Category:California ranchos". Emargie (talk) 06:17, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

Category

Category:Geographic coordinate lists state: These articles have lists of places identified by their latitude and longitude. They include the {{GeoGroupTemplate}}, to allow these places to be shown on a map., but this template do not add Category:Geographic coordinate lists to the articles that use the template. Is there a specific reason for that or can I add Category:Geographic coordinate lists to the template code? --NJR_ZA (talk) 18:05, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

openstreetmap

Is it possible to add this case to the redir option?

Gonioul (talk) 23:40, 2 April 2010 (UTC)

Sure, but where should it redirect? I don't think there's any official OSM site that has KML fetching functionality. OpenStreetMap:KML has a few examples to some odd sites, but it would probably be best for Wikipedia use if the meta:OpenStreetMap people working on the toolserver could set one up. --Para (talk) 08:05, 3 April 2010 (UTC)