Talk:All Graticules

The All Graticules page is used by the reference implentation (and others) to look up a place name from coordinate data alone. This also allows a human user to find (or verify the non-existance of) a graticule in the same way.

This talk page has been used to discuss naming conventions and the like. The mostly agreed upon points are summarized below.

Topics on this page which have clearly been handled or resolved can be found in the archives. When archiving a section of this Talk page, please say so in the edit summary here.

Graticule naming

Graticules are named based on the largest or most well known place located within them. A proper name consists of this name, then a comma, then the state or province or country name.

Long names, while inclusive, are generally frowned upon. Multiple common names within a graticule can best be handled with a redirect page.

Some cities are split two (or four!) ways by graticule lines. They will have two or more listings on this page, and the actual city page will usually list multiple graticules. Interested parties should check those individual pages for how meetups are determined. The Category Split Cities lists many of these locations.

In Europe, there are a lot of small countries, still i think we should decide and give only one simple name (city, country) to one graticule. My suggestion is the use of two principles:

1. name the graticule after the biggest city in the country that has the bigger area in the graticue, or
2. in cases of almost equal areas, or more than two countries, use thge biggest city in the graticule, and its country name.

For alternative names use redirection.
I think graticule pages should be created one by one, even in case of split cities, that can be the base, and we can create other pages (like a split-city-in-total page, or part-of-a-graticule page) based on this frame. --Tom 21:21, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

One more thing. A graticule should have the name of the city in its local form (like on Google Maps), and the name of the country in English. I'm wondering, though, what to do about non-latin lettered scripts, such as Greek, Hebrew and Cyrillic. Not to mention eastern asian languages. Any ideas? --Tom 21:34, 4 September 2008 (UTC)

How about start with any official transliteration accepted by that country? - Robyn 04:19, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Ordering

The current ordering of graticules within the continents is listed below the continent name. The automated tools don't have a preference for graticule ordering, of course, so this is primarily a human convenience.

Just a question: any reason why Central America (and Europe) is West to East, then North to South? I only ask because because San Juan, Puerto Rico is northmost and eastmost. Should Caribbean be its own category (eventually)? -- Jevanyn 18:54, 18 July 2008 (UTC)

Categories

On each graticule page are multiple categories.

• Active or Inactive
• Local geographical designation (State, Province, or Country)
• Regional features shared with other graticules (Rivers, Park Systems, etc.)

The Local geographical designations will be clustered into larger designations, then on up to continents. This allows, for example, the United States to be searched for the state of Idaho, then the city of Coeur d'Alene.

Other issues

It is not necessary to list contact information for a particular graticule - the history of wiki edits will effectively do that.

Active graticules missing from graticule.kml

Whenever I load the active graticule map, there are several grats that do not come up, for example, New York and Sacramento. Both of these grats are plenty active, but they don't get squares, while hundreds of inactive grats are present. Can we modify this file to include only active grats, or have an alternate file that only has active grats? And how do we keep it up to date? Update I see, it's meant to be read in Google Earth. But it covers the graticule with a black square, and adds a white outline for inactive grats. How about just an outline, for just active grats? -- Jevanyn 19:39, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

Sounds good to me - who is our expert on the .kml format? --Thomcat 20:20, 15 July 2008 (UTC)

My best guess is that Zigdon did it. The debug window is signed "dan", which is Zigdon's real name. Hermann also seems to know his way around .kml and Google Earth. -- Jevanyn 15:55, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I was trying to cover the contiguous USA's graticules and toward the end of that the graticules started disappearing. I asked Zigdon about it a few days ago (who in fact did make the .kml program) and he said he'd look into it. -- Moose Hole 16:25, 16 July 2008 (UTC)

The "active graticule" map has become useless because there are so many it takes forever to load and when they do you can't even see them all. What was it intended for? -Robyn 04:21, 12 September 2008 (UTC)

Suggestion: sections should be in tables

I did this change: 18:30, 18 September 2008 Ted (Talk | contribs) (97,563 bytes) (Rearranged 35-39N as a table, that I think is easier to read. Suggest other sections follow suit. Will note in discussion page.)

I think it's a good idea; it makes the sections much easier to look at, and easier to find your graticule on the page. I just broke things down by:

* New Row on change of Latitude
* New cell on change of (Longitude div 10)

Check out All_Graticules#Latitude_35_North_to_39_North for an example. If folks agree (and I really think they should :D), we can do the other sections, too. Ted 18:34, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

I would actually suggest to split up the page into regions, and then set up tables (cf. Germany). But I think that the peeron map is reading this page as its input - and I don't know if it might be confused by a different format. -- Relet 19:57, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

Ooo, Germany's page is pretty cool -- but I think that's more appropriate to separate pages per region (i.e., a United States of America page.) As this page is read programatically (which prevents too much deviation in format), I'm just trying to make it a little easier for human-folk to read. I found the very-long 1-column list unhelpful. In particular, I'm about to embark on a cross country trip, so seeing the graticules laid out vaguely N-S, W-E lets me follow my rough path and find graticules. (Of course, so does the peeron map page. Hmmm :) 63.201.144.200 20:11, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

I changed part of Europe into tables, but I used

• New row on change of Latitude
• New cell on change of Longitude

because with the (longitude div 10) I found it sometimes difficult to directly see the eastern/western neighbors. Danatar 14:03, 11 October 2008 (UTC)

The automatic script that parses these pages for inclusion in the maps DOES NOT READ THESE TABLES. Any graticule listed in one of them has about a 1:6 chance of being listed properly. Zigdon 00:14, 23 October 2008 (UTC)

Counting Named Graticules

I was curious to know how many graticules we had named so far. Does anyone know how to make one of those computer things count e.g. how many open parens are in the All Graticules page? -Robyn 23:19, 19 October 2008 (UTC)

http://wiki.xkcd.com/geohashing/All_Graticules?action=raw piped through

|grep -E '\[\[.*\|.*\(.*\)\]\]'|wc -l

yields me a number of 2083 currently. -- Relet 23:47, 19 October 2008 (UTC)