User talk:ReletBot/Country codes

• Add any shorthand I may have missed. Codes may be ambiguous if the context is clear.. i.e. graticules on the border to Indiana won't confuse "IN" with India.
• Needed: - a list of ISO/Zip codes for Canadian states

Do you mean postal codes for Canadian provinces and territories? (We don't have states). We have very detailed postal codes, but I could give you the letters they start with for each province. -Robyn

Yes, any commonly recognized (among Canadians) two- or three-letter code would do nicely. Unless you'd say that having the full name written out in the Canadian graticule templates isn't that bad after all. ;) -- relet 19:26, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Oh, thanks starbird! -- relet 19:27, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

• Todo: - check that the country names listed correspond to the ones actually used as categories in the wiki.

You perhaps miss the point slightly. Codes are brilliant for use in US states, and countries like UK and NZ where those abbreviations are commonly used by people already, but they're not much good when people don't already use them. Who knows where AO is? I certainly don't. I'd much prefer any foreign neighbour graticules around here to be listed as "Ireland" and "France" than "IR" and "FR", or whatever the codes are. These pages are read by people, not computers. -- Benjw 12:39, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

That's a bit Anglo-centric, isn't it? I would assume that people living next to Angola would know, just as I know that PL is Poland and CZ is the Czech republic - abbreviations which I also used in the graticule templates before they were rewritten by my own bot. I couldn't tell you on the other hand without looking it up whether MA is Maine, Maryland or Massachusetts, which may be a "brilliant" shortcut for people who are familiar with US states. I wouldn't even assume that everyone associates NZ with New Zealand without having the right context. The context is established by a) being on a graticule page in Australia (I assume) and b) the possibility to mouse-over to see where the link is leading. The idea was to keep the templates less cluttered, but still indicate that the neighbour graticule is on the border with another national or subnational entity. -- relet 13:08, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Benjw has just demonstrated that he doesn't know/use the codes of his neighbouring countries, so maybe it's Eurocentric to assume that those codes are in common use worldwide. I know some of the European codes because pretentious immigrants sometimes put them on their cars, but I don't think that's any more worldwide than those long skinny licence plates.

But that said, the robot can make the graticule links any way it likes, because the local participants can fix it up the way they like it. I presume the robot won't come by and change it back. The only shame to the robot creating so many inactive graticule pages is that the Random page link no longer has much chance of giving me an expedition. -24.83.1.77 21:41, 9 April 2009 (UTC)

Well, the idea was to have a way to update these graticule templates automatically when changes on All Graticules occur. That's something humans have failed at in the past. I would at least want to re-run it every now and then when enough change has happened to justify it. Hence, it would be nice to find a solution that everyone can agree to.

Until now, we have a few different opinions, and personally, I don't have any strong favors for either option. I am just interested in a possible consensus.

That said, we can have as many or as few shortcuts in the list as we like. If we only include US states and the UK, then only these will be replaced. I could also ignore certain pages, as I currently do with pages that do not use the graticule template (i.e. split cities, or some pages where it was forgotten). -- relet 09:02, 10 April 2009 (UTC)