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)