Talk:Most active graticules/old

Discussion

Final 2008 statistics at 2008 Most active graticules and archived talk at Talk:2008 Most active graticules.

Editor's Note

The exuberant Atlanta, Georgia graticules sweeps the old records off the charts. At this pace, they might catch up in successes before summer, and overall expeditions by fall. No sour grapes here, but it would be nice to live in a graticule without significant loss to water or impassable watershed.

Marching forward, --Thomcat 22:13, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Nope... It was April for successes and May for overall expeditions. --NWoodruff 21:05, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

Previous Notes

The totals for January 2009 are in, and my local charts are updated with the results of Benjw hunting for expeditions - thanks! Our big monthly winner is Atlanta, Georgia in each category (you guys know that it's okay to document unsuccessful expeditions, right?). Runners up include Mannheim, Germany, Pforzheim, Germany, and my own Seattle, Washington.

I changed the chart around also, so all of 2008 is in one column. We will continue to grow through 2009, then do chart compaction again in early 2010.

See you next month! --Thomcat 17:58, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Not Quite on Topic

I would be interested in seeing a graph, automated if possible, showing the number of active graticules and the number of expeditions mounted on a month-to-month basis. I'm still trying to figure out if our sport is growing slowly, static, flaring up randomly in various places and then dying down again or what. The fact that I singlehandedly got Slave Lake an award last August says that things were pretty slow then. -Robyn 19:42, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Maps and Statistics shows total expeditions by week and expeditions by graticule, but not both combined. Dawidi also has (had? I can't find it anymore) a world map animated gif that showed the expeditions on a daily basis. - Danatar 08:54, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

That gives me a pretty good idea. Kind of too soon too tell. Thanks. -Robyn 15:37, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Updating statistics

If you're going to update the statistics, do it for every single graticule up to a date. Updating just your personal/favourite graticule is not helpful, as whoever updates the rest of the graticules will have to double check your counting anyway. I'm sure Thomcat won't mind help, but updating only one graticule while updating the "as of XXXX-XX-XX" is not helpful, and also misleading. --joannac 21:54, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

I think at first that NWoodruff was excited about Atlanta breaking the record. I plan to verify all statistics, of course, and I usually do this a week after the end of the month, so the stragglers all update their expedition pages. --Thomcat 14:53, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Wow, you guys sure showed me.... It seemed that this page was falling way behind because of lack of interest. I show interest and get the smack down. Far be it from me to do anything helpful any more. Leave it up to the individual graticule if they want to participate or not. That way we can see if 1) they are participating 2) any one is in that graticule. If it doesn't get updated, who cares, it will be moved down the list. --72.243.74.114 15:17, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

It was not falling behind anything at all. We are only a few days into march just now, and expedition reports often come a few days late, so it was perfectly reasonable that february wasn't included yet. I also disagree with the rest of your statement. This is about graticules, not about single persons, and whether someone keeps track of the own numbers also here apart from all the more significant places can not be a point for getting into the list or not. A graticule whose participants don't edit their numbers in here themselves may still be the most active. --Ekorren 15:29, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

I also remember reading this, "Please note that all contributions to Geo Hashing may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then don't submit it here." --72.243.74.114 15:31, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Don't take it as a smackdown. You guys in Atlanta are awesome, and your excitement will be an encouragement for groups in other places. It's not that the page is falling behind, just that it's only updated once a month. To be fair, the page doesn't say it's only updated monthly, or that Thomcat is responsible for it. If you want to keep track of Atlanta's participation, feel free to do it on the graticule page. -- Jevanyn 15:36, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

Is the person citing "Please note that all contributions to Geo Hashing may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors" the same as the person who is upset that his/her work was edited mercilessly or is that shared IP just ironic Internet coincidence? The page probably should have a notice on it like "Ensure your graticule page is up to date with links to all expeditions therein. The adjudicator (currently Thomcat) will update this page about a week after the new month begins." Otherwise this will happen again.

I also want to answer the "leave it to the individual graticule" suggestion. This is not a good idea because what we really want to know is which graticules are geohashing the most, not which are editing the wiki the most. While for some of us it's natural to geohash when we can, document when we get back, and edit the wiki for hours when the geohash is out of reach, for others it's all we can do to get them to document their expedition. Some expeditions consist of one photograph, or a note on a user page, and someone else transfers the information to the graticule page. A Ninja Geohasher can earn his graticule an award too. Also I remember a month when I was the lone geohasher in a virgin graticule and was stunned to see it turn up on Thomcat's list. I never would have "entered" Slave Lake, but I was proud to put the ribbon on its page. -Robyn 16:00, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

You can check the Atlanta page and the Atlanta talk page if you want to see it updated daily. It is now automated. -NWoodruff

Did anyone not yet know the page Maps and statistics? -- relet 13:06, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

Can I get rid of this page? It's not being updated (almost the end of May, and April stats aren't up). Appears to be (almost) completely superseded by dawidi's tool (which has the added advantage of being automatically updated).

By "get rid", I mean remove the stats, keep the blurb, and have a link to dawidi's site. --joannac 00:00, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Why don't you copy the automatically updated code from the Atlanta graticule page to here, and put a more prominent link to Dawidi's page (which I can never find when I want). It looks like Thomcat is out of action for a while, but perhaps NWoodruff would be willing to be in charge of notifying graticules if anyone other than Atlanta happens to ever win an award. Portland might be in hot contention soon with all their geohashers. -Robyn 00:30, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

I'd prefer to keep this page, if Thomcat continues to update it. It is formatted so that you can easily follow a certain graticule's activity over multiple months (in one line), whereas dawidi's page is ordered by number of expeditions in each column, so you always have to search for a certain graticule's entry, which even may not be in the top 15 for a month. - Danatar 11:29, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

We could suggest this to dawidi. -- relet 11:42, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

I've seen the suggestion (just now). You should probably put such things on Talk:Maps and statistics so I know what to code if I ever run out of more urgent tasks ;) --dawidi 11:21, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

I'd prefer to get rid of the page because no other graticule other than Atlanta will win this award. I'll make sure of that. How many people have given up on wining the Consecutive Geohash award now? The two awards, go almost hand in hand. As per the Consecutive geohash page, and I paraphrase "All you need is a car and needlessly burn petrol to win the award". I say delete it and we can bring the page back when people start to see the fun again of getting out on a moments notice to some place that you haven't explored before instead of complaining that nobody is following "The Rules" any more. --NWoodruff 13:16, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Oh.. and there is two minutes until the market open price is posted. I can't wait. --NWoodruff 13:28, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Even if NWoodruff sustains his interest such that no other graticule ever takes the top award, people still like to see how they are doing, and I agree with Dawidi's point about the format. I wouldn't want to get rid of the page until the top ten of every monthly record was permanently 28/29/30/10, depending on the month--not even Atlanta does that now, even if we consider only expeditions, not coordinates reached. I don't see that happening for a long time, but even if it did a creative administrator of the page could reimagine it to celebrate "emerging graticules", the top ten graticules that were not yet maxed out to always geohash every day, or perhaps the graticules that had made the biggest gains since the previous month could be celebrated, and graticules could get ribbons not just for consecutive days, but for consecutive months of no missed days. I thought NWoodruff would be interested, as he already does a similar thing on the Atlanta page and permanently leading the pack is a good position from which to nurture other graticules to success, but I guessed wrong. I don't think I'm a good one to do it because I'm in more of a "All you need is a helicopter and needlessly burn Jet-A to win the award" sort of graticule and we haven't got the xkcd logo stencilled on our helicopter yet. Don't worry, we're still enjoying going camping, kayaking, cycling and mountain climbing on ludicrously short notice, and I think that's the way most people think of it. NWoodruff, would you object to your code being used to update this page, even if you don't want to supervise it? Someone with an interest should watch it, to just keep an eye on whether it is recording properly. -Robyn 16:40, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

No, I don't mind at all. I went ahead and updated the page for April. --NWoodruff 20:33, 27 May 2009 (UTC)

Needlessly burn Jet-A,,, Hmmm... I knew there was a reason why I liked you. --NWoodruff 02:20, 28 May 2009 (UTC)

It is now done for every single graticule all 452, right down to Morristown, Tennessee. I would have listed all 452 but it was a very long list. --NWoodruff 18:47, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Think before you robot-edit, or don't do it.

After the last update, this page is simply unreadable, and takes minutes to load. I have not undone it because I don't know which one of the old versions is the best to use. Please, someone choose an old version and undo the actual one, and please, never do a table with hundreds of columns again. --Ekorren 09:39, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Seconded. Can we keep it to just top 20 in each category please? Also, there are a few red links to graticules - if those can be fixed that would be great. Thanks --joannac 11:10, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

Thirded. - Danatar 12:10, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

On my POS DLS line at 1.5Mb and my 1Ghz processor machine it takes less than a second to load. I think you need to loose your Win 95 box and 9600 baud modem. You don't like it... Do it yourself. --NWoodruff 15:16, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

I quote joannac "If you're going to update the statistics, do it for every single graticule up to a date" --NWoodruff 15:24, 5 June 2009 (UTC)

It doesn't take very long for it to load for me, but I don't live across an ocean from the servers. It DOES bring my poor laptop to a crawl for a bit, which is annoying. Also, the table is ridiculously long. I think this page would be best served as a top 10/20/whatever relatively small number we choose list, and have a link to the full lists for each, for those who are curious. For a full list, there should be some kind secondary sort for the full list because when you get down to only a few total hashes, the graticules appear to be in random order. --aperfectring 00:27, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

The format isn't a problem to me, and despite being on stupid hotel internet it didn't delay loading. I think it's pretty cool having a list of all active graticules like that. I suggest that the load time could be fixed by instead of making this a dynamic table (it's calculated at load time, is that right?) have it static and updated once a week? (month?) and static. That makes it distinct from the Maps & Statistics page. I would suggest having a top ten also, though. -Robyn 03:30, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

I investigated (and fixed) the redlinks. There were three main problems:

• 1. any graticule names containing parentheses had had them stripped out,
• 2. for graticules that did not have unique names, unique names had been provided but in the form [[Denver, Colorado (NE)]]<\nowiki> not <nowiki>[[Denver, Colorado|Denver, Colorado (NE)]]
• 3. Some country names were mangled/missing (e.g. 'the Netherlands' instead of "Netherlands" and "Peterborough" instead of "Peterborough, Australia".

One expedition was named and categorized in a wrong (unnamed) graticule. That was the geohasher's fault, but a human compiler would have caught and investigated it. As I see it, the reason this page should exist separate from Maps & Statistics is to add a human touch to the machine compliation, to catch the sort of thing that computers don't. Also if there is a graticule list that was used to compile this page, please let us know where it came from so it can be fixed.

Unrelated to this page, but thanks to the page for bringing it to my attention, there are many split graticules whose parts do not have unique names. Even if they share a page, they should have separate, unique entries in the All Graticules list. -Robyn 05:02, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Also, if you removed all the one-expedition-only graticules (an embarrassing proportion of which are mine) the list becomes much more manageable. Perhaps three would be a reasonable minimum for inclusion on the most active list. -Robyn 05:30, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

The names of the Graticles come from the "All Graticules" web page. I first find the lat and lon and then read the Grat name. I run a simple routine to remove the parentheses from the name. If there is more than one parentheses all of them are removed. I'll need to change it to only remove the first and last one.

I was a liar. On my 1Gh box with a crappy 1.5mb DLS line, Ubuntu with FireFox v3.0 loads the page at 2.82 seconds. The same box running IBM OS/2 with FireFox v3.0 loads in 2.99 seconds. But, the same machine with Windows XP home with IE 7.0 loads in 6.4 seconds, which did seem kind of slow.

Monday to Friday I'll have the list do the top 100.

Saturday and Sunday I'll have the complete list

The sub sort is which ever Gratcule has an Expedition first to get to which ever total number is listed first. If there are three graticules each with 10 expeditions TOTAL, if the first one reached 10 in March, the second reached 10 in April, and the third reached 10 in May, they would be listed in that order. If all three reached 10 on the same day, it would be in the order of how they are listed on the "Coordinates Reached" page or other corresponding page. --NWoodruff 21:25, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

Worksforme. (smoothly). I like it. :D -- relet 22:13, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

So how was it that Netherlands graticules has a superfluous "the" added in the name, Luxembourg and Australia were missing country names and all the ones with NE/SW issues had links to the display names and not the actual names? -04:53, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

It's them damn humans in the loop. We should eradicate them all! Mua-harrr! -- ReletBot 22:04, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Sorting

Copied from above:

there should be some kind secondary sort for the full list because when you get down to only a few total hashes, the graticules appear to be in random order. --aperfectring 00:27, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

The sub sort is which ever Gratcule has an Expedition first to get to which ever total number is listed first. If there are three graticules each with 10 expeditions TOTAL, if the first one reached 10 in March, the second reached 10 in April, and the third reached 10 in May, they would be listed in that order. If all three reached 10 on the same day, it would be in the order of how they are listed on the "Coordinates Reached" page or other corresponding page. --NWoodruff 21:25, 6 June 2009 (UTC)

More discussion

I think that is great idea for how to sort, but it doesn't look like it currently works that way. If you look at place 15 for (18 total expeditions) for 2009-06-10, you get the following table:

	Graticule	Meetup in	Total		Retro	2008	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Jun
15	Canberra, Australia	-35 149	18		1	13	1	2	1	0	0	0
	Bamberg, Germany	49 10	18		0	6	1	3	3	0	4	1
	Portland, Oregon	45 -122	18		2	10	1	0	1	0	2	2
	Hamburg (West), Germany	53 9	18		0	10	1	1	1	2	3	0
	Bellingham, Washington	48 -122	18		0	9	2	0	2	3	2	0

As described above, Canberra is first, as it should be. Then Hamburg and Bellingham should be next in some order, followed by Bamberg and Portland in some order.

The table looks great, and it is awesome that it is updated every day. Thanks for your hard work on this NWoodruff. --aperfectring 13:05, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

There is an order to the sub-order. I read the coordinates reached page first. So, if you reach 18 with only coordinates reached, you will get a higher ranking than you would if your graticule had 10 coordinates reached and 8 coordinates not reached. Then add on retro coordinates reached, then retro coordinates not reached. --NWoodruff 14:24, 10 June 2009 (UTC)