User talk:GhostInTheMachine

This user knows that it can be a challenge to keep AGF in mind.

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CS1 error on Eddie Hick

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When to geocoord and when not?

Hello! If there is guidance for the above question, I would be grateful. I've been beavering away since January hunting down coordinates for abandoned gold mines, hiking trailheads, former African American towns, plane crash sites, roads, bridges, recording studios, electrical power lines, etc.

The other day it came to my attention that I may have been wrong. Pi.1415926535 designated a whole series of articles as not needing coordinates here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Pi.1415926535. Since the geocoord tag is placed by anome.bot, I asked The Anome for guidance about what does and doesn't need coordinates and the closest thing to a response is them returning the geocoord tag to the Whittier Fault article. So I've been marking articles not related to geologic formations or other things of national importance as not needing them.

What the $%@* are we supposed to do? I'm very confused. (I want back all the hours I've wasted hunting down unneeded coordinates, lol.) Oona Wikiwalker (talk) 20:01, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

@Oona Wikiwalker: First off, your efforts have certainly not been wasted! You've done a wonderful job tracking down coordinates for some rather difficult-to-locate sites. There's no official criteria on whether or not an article should have coordinates. I have three criteria that I personally use:

• Does the subject have a single fixed location? Articles like film festivals that move every year, ships that regularly move or have been scrapped, military campaigns across a wide area, and college districts with multiple colleges don't have a single fixed location that's useful to add. West Coast Stock Car/Motorsports Hall of Fame (an online museum) and UCLA Extension (a university program with multiple locations and no primary one) are examples from my recent edits.
• Is it possible to determine the coordinates to a useful precision? Some articles simply aren't possible to locate accurately enough to be useful: long-abandoned settlements only described as "about 10 miles east of XYZ", sensitive archeological sites whose location is withheld, sea battles with wildly differing accounts of their location, etc. If further research may reveal the answer, the "coords needed" template can stay. But if it's never going to be possible to add accurate coordinates, it shouldn't just sit in the maintenance category forever.
• Can it meaningfully be described with a single set of coordinates? Point features (like the mines, towns, crash sites, bridges, and studios you mention) are definite yesses. Longer features like roads, rivers, and mountain ranges often cannot be described with a single set of coordinates - they need a map instead. (I'm happy to give you guidance on creating KML and GeoJSON map data if you ever want.) Sometimes it's possible to add coords for endpoints like the mouth of a river or the trailheads of a trail; sometimes that's not really useful to add to the article. This one in particular is a judgement call, and your decisions so far have been just fine.

Best, Pi.1415926535 (talk) 20:22, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

Thank you very much for clearing away my confusion, Pi! I'm going to make sure I understand. (I did think there were rather a lot of road requests in Los Angeles county, but put that down to the car culture there.)

I find it reassuring that the admins keep an eye on things as we newbs wobble about on our new bicycles trying not to run over the flowerbeds. Oona Wikiwalker (talk) 21:43, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

What Pi says makes sense to me. Places should have coordinates stated, if the coordinates can be known. Things that were once in a place, but can move, generally would not have coordinates. Is this discussion about a specific article that I have edited? — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 20:42, 14 May 2024 (UTC)

It was about the trail in Alaska, but now I understand better and I'm not upset. I'm going to reread what Pi said to make sure I understand and don't get confused again. Again, no one has done anything amiss. I thought *I* had and had wasted months of effort. Oona Wikiwalker (talk) 21:35, 14 May 2024 (UTC)