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You will notice that in my previous edit I had put the cities details back into a new section - I was perhaps a bit hasty in removing them the first time. However, their inclusion in the main list, in my opinion, looks very untidy. Also, the page looks quite different from the other meridian pages - e.g. the table is split into one section per US state, rather than one US section listing the states. A bit of consistency would be nice.
So my counter-question is: why the objection to having moving city details to a separate section, like it was before your revert?
My next point is that surely the Pacific Ocean needs no coordinates. Pinpointing it to a spot on the equator just looks silly. The Pacific is big; people know where it is. Bazonka (talk) 18:51, 28 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Certainly a separate section is better than no info, although it doesn't look as nice as the table in the top section. We could create a similar table format in the details section, but then the whole article is so short that there is little reason to break it up in the first place. Another option is collapsible tables that are located in the main table but can be expanded to show detail.
Most longitude and latitude line articles don't have this level of detail currently, but like the rest of Wikipedia, stubs will fill out with more detailed information as interested editors see the articles. If we come up with a format that looks good, it can be a model for other articles, but we shouldn't ban detail just because most existing pages don't have it. If there is a project page where discussion of this kind of thing is centralized, let me know.
There is a lot of space in the left hand column, the subnational subdivisions of large countries like the US are as large and important as most countries, and many longitude lines such as this one only pass through a handful of countries. It makes sense to allow large subnational jurisdictions to share the left-hand headings, especially if they have a significant number of points in the right-hand column. The alternative is introducing more than two columns, which seems like a waste when all except the rightmost will be mostly whitespace. There is little risk of confusing nations and subnational entities in the left-hand column since the country names appear first and have flags.
For coordinates for the Pacific etc., the point is not that you need the numbers to manually find the Pacific on a map, which would indeed be absurd, but that the coordinate link with appropriate scale parameter is a convenient link to a map of the world centered on a point in the Pacific with sufficient scale to see the Pacific and surroundings. --JWB (talk) 20:00, 28 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not "banning detail" - I've already said that I was too hasty in removing the cities the first time, and I am happy for them to remain. You want them in the main table, I want them separately; it's clearly a matter of opinion whose version looks better. But we should try to be consistent with other lat/long articles - if you want a "model for other articles", look at 45th parallel north and Tropic of Capricorn (the latter needs a tidy up, but you get the idea) - these are well-established articles, which surely act as a model for this one. Consistency.
And sorry, but I utterly fail to see the need for coords for the Pacific. Nobody's ever going to click on the link - they already know where the Pacific is. Perhaps a more logical coordinate would be the point at which the meridian leaves California and enters the Pacific. The equator seems to be an arbitrary location somewhere on the meridian - I just don't get it. Bazonka (talk) 11:23, 29 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Tropic of Capricorn has cities in the right-hand column of the table, so it hardly seems to support the case for excluding cities and banishing them to a lower section.
I click on the link - not to find where the Pacific is, but to see where the meridian is in the Pacific. Yes, the choice of latitude is arbitrary, but how best to choose a latitude in the middle of the ocean? --JWB (talk) 17:49, 29 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, that's true - some of them have the same names as cities.
What makes sense is for the rightmost column to have the units at the greatest level of detail, whatever that happens to be. If it's provinces, provinces; if cities are also included, cities. As noted, there are wide variations in size and importance, and the nominal level of nation - 1st level subdivision - 2nd level subdivision is arbitrary.
You have not answered the argument that all of the tables are still relatively small and don't need to be broken up; or that even when they do get too big, they can be made expandable/collapsible. --JWB (talk) 21:06, 29 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]
