Template talk:NRHPGoogleMapFootnote

wording

I think the part that says "NRIS longitudes in Washington are higher by about 4.5 seconds, and are lower by about 2.0 seconds in Maine." is stylistically awkward. For better parallel structure I would prefer something like "NRIS longitudes are higher by about 4.5 seconds in Washington, and are lower by about 2.0 seconds in Maine." Any comments? Ntsimp (talk) 16:54, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

I set up this footnote originally i think. I believe it is used in many articles. It has been bothering me that it describes the problem with coordinates only in terms of seconds, about which most readers do not have a clue. It would be more helpful for readers to describe, instead or in addition, what the discrepancy is in distance measured in tenths of a mile or yards or feet (using U.S. measurement unit as it applies to U.S. articles). I don't know myself right now what those distances are. Note that seconds of longitude translates to different distances in the specific U.S. areas. A new wording should address also the awkwardness noted by Ntsimp. --doncram (talk) 18:16, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

Non-specific

Please change:

highly accurate WGS84 GPS system used by Google maps.

to:

highly accurate WGS84 GPS system used by most on-line maps.

in order to make this template generic. It should then be moved to {{NRHP map footnote}}, for the same reason, and to comply with template naming conventions. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 21:09, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

I'd far rather that all of the disclaimer junk were simply deleted. This is a citation template and should be worded as such; instead, it's a long spiel on one editor's personal experiences with the source in question. A better solution would be repurposing as a general citation template, in the manner of {{FOLDOC}}, and junking everything past the first sentence. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 13:38, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

Thumperward's ideas may have some mileage, but I have actioned the initial request as it seemed uncontroversial. — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 20:35, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

update the text

Is anyone watching here? If you look at the text it obviously needs to be updated. It is transcluded into 2,442 NRHP list-articles currently, and is overly negative about the quality of coordinates, since so many have been corrected/improved since 2011, when perhaps the language was accurate. It should be acknowledged still that coordinates are imperfect, and are effectively crowd-sourced now, or largely crowd-sourced, and are not taken from NRIS or any other single source. In fact we have not kept track of coordinate sources, much at all, though there has been some relatively recent progress in using "source:USERNAME" by some (covered in several wt:NRHP discussions).

Any suggestions on text now? If there is not discussion, I will conclude there is no one watching, and that any change is probably an improvement. :) --Doncram (talk) 07:29, 18 October 2018 (UTC) P.S. I do confess the original language was mine, all the unnecessary length and handwringing and it being my personal judgment and all that. I did not suspect it would be repeated widely without being improved, but perhaps it is useful that we can fix it centrally. --Doncram (talk) 07:37, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

The current text is

The latitude and longitude information provided in this table was derived originally from the National Register Information System, which has been found to be fairly accurate for about 99% of listings. For about 1% of NRIS original coordinates, experience has shown that one or both coordinates are typos or otherwise extremely far off; some corrections may have been made. A more subtle problem causes many locations to be off by up to 150 yards, depending on location in the country: most NRIS coordinates were derived from tracing out latitude and longitudes from USGS topographical quadrant maps created under the North American Datum of 1927, which differs from the current, highly accurate WGS84 GPS system used by most on-line maps. Chicago is about right, but NRIS longitudes in Washington are higher by about 4.5 seconds, and are lower by about 2.0 seconds in Maine. Latitudes differ by about 1.0 second in Florida. Some locations in this table may have been corrected to current GPS standards.

I dunno, better would perhaps be:

The latitude and longitude coordinates provided in this and similar tables were originally sourced mostly from the National Park Service's NRIS database, which included errors, but many coordinates have been improved by users/editors.

I don't want to be unnecessarily blaming at the NPS or NRHP system, but I do want to be positive about the direction of change. And we can't make any specific claims about improvements or state of accuracy in "this" list-article, we can just say in general that the coordinates are pretty good or have improved, across all tables. --Doncram (talk) 07:37, 18 October 2018 (UTC)