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England's mountains

Hi. I found this project through Table Mountain, which is a mere 3,500 feet high or thereabouts. Thus I wondered if England's mountains are "admissible" ... see e.g. Scafell Pike, Helvellyn, Skiddaw... they are not much by world mountain standards... but are all England has got and thus are already have short articles. Is there a threshold for listing on list of mountains?

If not, what might a threshold be? Maybe "if the mountain is well-known in its own local area then it deserves an listing". This means that we could have different standards for inclusion in, say, Namibia (virtually no mountains) and Nepal (virtually no non-mountainous areas). Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 06:22, 7 May 2004 (UTC)

Interesting question; really haven't considered any lower bounds on what can be classified as a mountain for inclusion by the project. I know some what are basically landfills laughably called "mountains". 1,000 metres (3,280 ft) is getting rather small but of course, if you are living at sea level with a 1,000 metre high mountain beside you, it's a notable elevation for that area. In Nepal, there are a lot of "big hills" (that's what the Nepalese guides call them) in the Himalayas which are over 10,000 ft. In most other parts of the world, those would be notable mountains. Yet, for these types of mountains in Nepal, it might be questionable whether they deserve their own article, especially if they are not named. As for England, if they are significant in elevation in relation to the surrounding area, they probably deserve their own article. If you can find the mountain on http://www.peakware.com, it's probably worth an article. RedWolf 06:54, May 7, 2004 (UTC)
Interestingly that site lists the same five english mountains as we have (except Great Gable which might not have been done yet) , so I think we are on the right lines. Elevation is about 2,500 above surroundings for each. I think they deserve articles but the infobox will have some non-useful information (e.g. first ascent - these mountains were climbed as soon as the Ice Age receded). Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 09:14, 7 May 2004 (UTC)
Some of the infobox lines are optional like topo map, type of rock and age of rock. There are mountains where the first ascent would be quite difficult to ascertain, such as you have given. If you think there are mountains that fall into that category, then drop the first ascent line from the infobox. You can post a comment on the relevant talk page if you wish to document your decision. RedWolf 07:14, May 23, 2004 (UTC)

Featured article

Hi all - Every WikiProject should have at least one article featured, IMO. I'm not sure if any WikiProject Mountains articles are featured yet but I would like to encourage project members to look at and improve Mount St. Helens so that it can go through the FA selection process. I've already greatly expanded the article but I've burned out on putting the last bit of shine on it. Specifically there is needless overlap between the ==Human history== and ===Goat Rocks Eruptive Period=== sections that should be resolved (the second section should just be a description of the what happened while the human accounts and human effects should go to the human history section). There are similar issues with the section titled ===The 1980 eruption=== (which was not written by me and contains some info that contradicts 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption). More images and better image placement should also be done. Cheers! --mav 04:44, 23 May 2004 (UTC)

Mount St. Helens is a good candidate, because it is both exciting (Mountain Blows Up!) and reasonably well-written and long. I looked around at some of the other articles in the project --- another possiblity is Mount Everest. --- hike395 17:51, 23 May 2004 (UTC)
I would agree that the Mt. St. Helens article is a good choice, given its recent geological activity and contains substantial content. I would like to see more of the red links go away too. Mt. Everest is good too, although I think it currently is slanted more towards mountaineers/climbers (not that I personally have a problem with that!) than general interest. Granted, most stories on Everest even by tv media concentrate on mountaineering than anything else it seems when it would be nice to see some Sherpa culture and lifestyle. When I wrote up the article on Anatoli Boukreev, I summarized what happened in the 1996 tragedy after I read his book (The Climb). It might be good to add a section on that event to Mt. Everest, as it was something reported on by various media as well as in books. RedWolf 06:44, May 26, 2004 (UTC)

Somebody went ahead and nominated Mount St. Helens on the FAC page, so I cleaned the article up and it is now a featured article. I would like to put 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption through the FAC process but would like to have some feedback first at talk:1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. --mav 08:45, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

MW 1.3 broke our template

It doesn't align right any more, for example, take a look at Mount Baker. It's really awful. What should we do? -- hike395 01:11, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

I tracked it down --- it doesn't seem to substitute msg:Mountain_box_start into the table anymore. I'll see if this has been reported. We can either wait for a bug fix, or try to manually change >100 articles :-(. -- hike395 01:22, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

mav and I discussed it, and came up with a simple solution, which has problems: manually substitute in the contents of Template:Mountain_box_start back into all of the tables (to fix the tables). Now, tracking is broken. If we place all the articles into Category:Mountain (which would be the ideal solution), there is a bug that breaks the infobox.. Mav was in favor of tracking simply through Template:Mountain on the Talk pages and making sure that the Talk pages were up-to-date. Comments? --- hike395 03:18, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
I was contemplating whether to agree to the msg -> subst change until you brought up the Categories issue. We have exactly the same problem in the Albums project. I recommend that we wait a few days to see if the developers are going to fix this message bug quickly. I haven't found the bug reported yet in SF but I only did a few searches earlier today without a manual scan of the new bugs. RedWolf 04:49, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
I have added a comment to an existing bug [1] related to use of tables within templates. RedWolf 06:06, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
Bad news --- the developer has posted to Sourceforge that the bug is fixed, but it isn't fixed for our articles. --- hike395 15:14, 31 May 2004 (UTC)
Seems to have just ignored what I added and the status has now been changed to Pending. So, I have opened a new bug report: [2] RedWolf 15:45, 31 May 2004 (UTC)

I've seen a category work-around that would not break the page layout and should still work when the category display issue is fixed: Add <br clear="all"> after the category tag. This only works when the category tag is at the top of the page and does leave an extra line of whitespace above the article. See Plutonium. --mav 03:18, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Whatever we do, we should do it pretty quickly: people are starting to indivudually "fix" articles (like Mount Everest), and pretty soon we'll have a mess on our hands. Because of this, I'm in favor of Mav's idea, even if it is slightly sub-optimal. -- hike395 16:22, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)
How about putting "[[category:mountain]]<br clear="all">" into a template and put the template in every article. When the code is fixed, simply get rid of the br from the template, thus fixing all articles at once. Pete/Pcb21 (talk) 17:10, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Parameterized Template

I'm working on a parameterized template on test wiki at the moment. Hopefully, will have something to show in a few hours. RedWolf 03:12, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)
Cool! Hope it fixes the tracking problem. -- hike395 03:34, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Well, after spending several hours this evening playing with a template that accepts parameters, I have concluded that the current implementation just is not feature rich enough yet to work with the layout we currently use. The issues include

  • passing vertical bars as values of a parameter in order to pass a piped link doesn't seem to be possible. For example, I was using a topo parameter to pass [[National Topographic System|NTS]] 83N/03 but the | before the NTS causes the parser to treat it as the start of the next parameter. I could not find a way to escape it either with || or \|.
  • I tried using multiple templates to build the final table but if you start a table within one template the system automatically appends a closing table tag, even though you haven't defined one.
  • Trying to reference images using a parameter just doesn't want to work. The system just displays Missing image.
  • Cannot have optional parameters and any way to control the output if a parameter was not specified.

So, it seems that all we can do at the moment, is to define another template that defines the Mountain category and starts the table. Then, we must use {{subst:Mountain_box_begin}}. You can see an example of this on test: Harney Peak on test. The template is at: Mountain_box_begin template. You will need to edit the template to see the contents.

RedWolf 05:57, Jun 2, 2004 (UTC)

Sorry it didn't work. Correct me if I'm wrong: we're going to use categories to track the pages, the mav br clear=all hack to avoid the MonoBook bug, but this will all be hidden and all we have to do is use {{subst:Mountain_box_begin}} instead of {| {{msg:Mountain_box_start}}. Is that all correct, or am I missing something? --- hike395 08:01, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

New template: Mountain_box_begin

They have moved the Category links to the bottom of the article so we no longer need to add the Categories hack suggested by mav. I have created Template:Mountain box begin in the English wikipedia and added some info to the talk page on how to use it. I have used it on Mount Temple already and looks good so far. The mountain will be added to Category:Mountains. I will start applying the new template to other mountains and feel free to do the same. I'll update the project page in a day or two once others have posted any additional comments. Also, I setup the categories as follows: 


       Geography
          |
          |
          v
   Mountain ranges
          |
          |
          v
      Mountains

Eventually, we'll probably add subcategories to Mountains probably for each continent and then perhaps for each country. Open to other suggestions of course.

RedWolf 03:42, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)

First off, thanks for fixing the template!!! I really appreciate it.
Sadly, I don't agree with the categories as they stand. A single mountain belongs to a single mountain range, but all mountains don't belong to all mountain ranges, see what I mean? I think that Mountains and Mountain Ranges should be sibling categories, under geography.
Now, if you want to distinguish mountains per continent, I can imagine Category:North American mountains belonging to Category:Mountains, but that may be overkill right now. -- hike395 04:27, 3 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Glad to help fix the template, only wished the parameterized template would work but maybe they'll make the template better in the next version.
I can see your point about mountain ranges and mountains. I had only given it a moment's thought as I just wanted to set something up initially and get on with the work at hand. It's quite easy to move it to another category (which I see that Mountains is now a sub of Geography). I guess I thought it would be handy to have the Mountains category link on the Mountain ranges page but I guess we can reference it manually using a starting colon. RedWolf 22:11, Jun 3, 2004 (UTC)

Other wikipedias

Does this template apply to other language wikipedia's? I'd like to use it in Dutch and in German. Is this possible? If so, how? Gerritholl 11:59, 1 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Of course you can use it in other Wikipedias. It's text and thus licensed under the GFDL. All you'd have to do is translate the English words of course! David Newton 02:04, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Category Mountains vs Category Volcanos

I've started changing the volcanos that have Wikipedia articles and infoboxes from this project to have Volcanos as their category, rather than mountains. Since a volcano is somewhat distinct from an ordinary mountain, and since the volcano category is a sub-category of the mountain category anyway it seems like a good idea. David Newton 02:07, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)

Hi, David. I converted over Category:Volcanos to Category:Volcanoes, to reflect the spelling that is much more common in professional circles. As I was doing this, I was struck that many of the articles were about islands and caldera lakes. Since there isn't a 1-1 relationship between volcanoes and mountains, I put back the Category:Mountains tag on the articles that you removed them from. In fact, I didn't put Category:Mountains on all mountainous volcano articles --- I only put them on the articles that use the WikiProject template. My intent there was to gradually convert all of the volcanic mountains to the template, and change them over at that time (so we can keep track of what pages live within this project.
Does this make sense to everyone? -- hike395 21:53, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Sounds okay to me. RedWolf 21:13, Jun 14, 2004 (UTC)

Mount Adams

Please see Talk:Mount Adams for discussion on how to disambiguate this page. RedWolf 21:13, Jun 14, 2004 (UTC)

Hills with several named summits

Hi, I found this project, but I'm not sure that it is quite right for British hills. Have a look at Beinn Alligin, a page I've been working on. I think this type of fact box is better suited to British hills. Obviosluy the "two hills one page" needs justification: both hills are munros, but it is normal to talk only about "beinn alligin" in the singular. Many other hills are treated like this, eg Buchaille Etive Mor, Liathach. Thoughts pleaseGrinner 13:55, Jul 12, 2004 (UTC)

Looks fine to me. It's common throughout the world to have multiple named summits on a single mountain. I expect some mountains in other countries will need something like this. Gdr 14:35, 2004 Jul 14 (UTC)

Russian mountains

Could anyone involved in this project please take a look at the articles listed on the Wikipedia:WikiProject Russian federal subjects/Status page in the In Progress and Done sections and make any necessary correction to the mountains references? Let me know if you need more info. Thanks!--Ëzhiki 17:49, Jul 14, 2004 (UTC)

Still active?

I've moved Wikipedia:WikiProject Mountains to the Inactive section of the WikiProject page, as it hasn't been edited since Nov 1st; I wanted to let you all know, and ask if you're still working on it. If so, feel free to move it back up into the active section. JesseW 08:08, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

We're still working on it. Not much to discuss, we're just making progress. -- hike395 16:30, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)
The project is still very much active. While the main project page may appear to show inactivity, one should check the related discussion pages first before considering inactivating this project. RedWolf 03:41, Dec 4, 2004 (UTC)

Worth Discussing?

Hello. I have created the Template:Infobox mountain. If you would like to alter it (as this is not my particular area of interest) feel free to do so. If you would like to see how it looks, I have implemented it at Ascension Island. All things should be approximately the same, with the exception of the border and the entries, as all are included (a feature I've not yet learned to like as some fields need be left empty) with the exception of Topo map, which is to be used with U.S. Mountains, using Template:Infobox US mountain. (Once again feel free to edit those — my familiarity with templates and tables is nil.) This is the base:

WikiProject Mountains/Archive 1

The U.S. one should look exactly the same but with topo inserted between location and range. Also, as hike395 pointed out, you might not want to use them and of course you don't have to use them. This is just an effort on my part. You can keep doing it the same way that you have or as the theme of this comment suggests — fix it the way that you want it. Moogle 04:34, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Thanks, Moogle, for this work. We can certainly try and modify it. There are some essential rows for the mountain infobox --- Name, Elevation, Latitude, Longitude, Location, and Range. We could have a template for the start of the infobox and one for the middle, and then manually close the table with a |}.
The only template-y way I know to do optional fields is to make every row into its own template, which seems to defeat the purpose of templates, other than making it easier to globally change all the infoboxes.
I'm not sure I would use this, myself --- what do other people think? -- hike395 04:49, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)
  • This project requires the ability to specify optional parameters and not have content included if the optional parameter is not supplied. I really do NOT like what some have done to implement this themselves by splitting a template into multiple parts. RedWolf 02:50, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)

Worth Discussing II

Though it seems you have moved beyond this, I have created Template:Basic mountain and Template:Mountain picture and altered the original Infoboxes to use coordinates. The new ones are the same style as the initial infobox, but shorter, using only hike395's essentials as stated above.

As noted, I am not an expert in these tables, so I do not know how to change the width of the columns as has been done with those below.

Digression: You don't need quotes for border=1 and others. Putting the actual thing on the page makes this page very long and cluttery, would it not be easier to just link them?

As always, be sure to change, add, and remove anything that you decide should be different. Moogle 01:21, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

On geographical coordinates

{{{name}}}
[[Image:{{{image}}}|300px]]
{{{caption}}}
Elevation {{{elevation}}}
Coordinates {{{latitude}}}
{{{longitude}}}
Location {{{location}}}
Range {{{range}}}
Type {{{type}}}
Age of Rock {{{age}}}
First Ascent {{{first}}}
Easiest Route {{{easiest}}}
Last Eruption {{{eruption}}}

Wouldn't it be nice to have geographical coordinates handled in a uniform manner (throughout Wikipedia) so that any geograpical positional ref. in an article would be clickable, revealing a page (much like with ISBN) that gives a choice of various maps, topological resources and satelite photots for that location?

For that to happen, all coordinates need to be uniform. Presumably a template is a good choice for that, see Template talk:Coordinate dms for some info on an initial implementation.

I have made a demo in Mount Baker. By clicking on the [1] you will be brought to Mapquest, where you can zoom out and find out more about the vicinity of the mountain. Hopefully, more map resources can be added later.

Two caveats: For such a scheme, it is much cleaner if the latitude and longitude appears together, e.g. within a box in the table. This can be done by placing a <br> in the middle. The current demo retains the two boxes, but it is pretty clumsy.

Additionally, there is currently a problem with fractional seconds and Mapquest. So I had to leave them out (they are still there as a source comment). Sorry.

See Wikipedia_talk:Manual_of_Style_(dates_and_numbers)#Suggestion:_Template_for_geographic_coordinates for a discussion.

--Egil 16:49, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

We had originally discussed combining latitude and longitude onto one line when originally creating the infobox. I don't think "Coordinates" was suggested so that might be a good enough term to finally combine on one line. However, see my comments above regarding the issues with templates and optional parameters. Last eruption only applies to a smaller subset of mountains and age of rocks is usually hard to find without a fair bit of research. Granted the USGS does a pretty good job for U.S. mountains. RedWolf 07:28, Feb 12, 2005 (UTC)
My main issue is that MapQuest is not appropriate for mountains --- it only shows roads, which are often absent around mountains (well, at least interesting mountains). So, I'm not sure how useful the MapQuest maps are. The Topozone maps are really very useful for the US, but they take decimal degrees. RedWolf and I went back and forth about this (see Wikipedia:WikiProject Mountains/General), and I couldn't think of a good solution, so I'm just using Geolinks templates right now to show the maps in the external links section. If Egil can think of a way of incorporating topo maps, I would be strongly in favor. -- hike395 08:22, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I very much understand your desire for a link to a topo map. The idea was certainly that in the final implementation, the georef would appear as a wikilink to a special Wiki page with a list of many map/topological/sat-photo resources, with pre-loaded links whenever possible. At a later stage, the mechanism could even be used to make the reverse linkage, e.g. a simple Wiki-internal map generated by some 'bot that shows the various mountains in relation to each other, each mountain with a click-through to the appropriate Wikipedia article. So please regard the current Mapquest link as a proof-of-concept only. (That said, I found even Mapquest useful in finding out where a mountain is located relative to known rivers, lakes and cities.) Finally, having the same mechanism for handling geographichal coordinates would make it easier to relate mountains to other phenomena, like for instance waterfalls. -- Egil 14:24, 12 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I have made a Wikipedia:WikiProject Geographical coordinates for this feature. -- Egil 10:26, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I have also implemented a proof-of-concept of the map page, running on and off-site server (until permissions is granted to include this in-house). Can you please update Wikipedia:Map sources with the maps and resources you know about. The format is explained in the project page.

Any yes, if the lat/long really is going to become a standard Wiki-link in the final interpretaion. the latitude and longitude needs to be in one box. -- Egil 15:39, 13 Feb 2005 (UTC)

There is now an implementation that includes some topological charts and aerial photos. Try it out via Mount Baker. Please add more resources that you know about. -- Egil 10:23, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Yes, I saw that, it's useful. But, I would not recommend spreading this beyond one demo infobox, because it relies on your own personal web server. It would be cool to plug it into MediaWiki. --- hike395 15:46, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)
That is defintely and indeed the intention. The demo machine is running the latest MediaWiki, and all the code I've written is in PHP, meant to plug right in to the MediaWiki source. What I want to do is:
  1. Test more. There are probably enough features for the time being. Did anyone notice the Ordnance Survey grid refs? ;-)
  2. Convince some MediaWiki developer that this is useful stuff, so that it can be included in the MediaWiki code. (I would assume that it in this respect helps to show it is a useful feature).
-- Egil 17:46, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Status update: The "map sources" feature and the geo tag is now available as extension gis in MediaWiki, see meta:Gis for a description. If desired, this extension can also support a database that will give a Neighborhood capability for all articles with a coordinate. Inclusion of this feature is of course a decision that needs to be made... -- Egil 23:36, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Example of what can be done with NASA World Wind

Installing NASA World Wind (sorry, Windows only so far), then following the geographic coordinates link in the Mount Baker infobox, selecting the World Wind link at the bottom of the Map Sources page, then selecting Landsat-7 gives full 3D visualization, producing images like this:

Mount Baker

The yellow rings are Wikipedia click-through links, the upper one is for Seattle Space Needle. 

-- Egil 23:05, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)


Conversion of coordinates to Template:Coor

As the format of template:coor dms already offers consistent formatting and (if necessary easy conversion to future formats), I propose to proceed now with the conversion of the current two fields in the infobox to:

Coordinates: 46°33′N 7°58′E / 46.550°N 7.967°E / 46.550; 7.967


This would be similar to the samples in Category:Mountains of Switzerland and the formatting done in other fields (see Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geographical_coordinates#Series_of_coordinates). D6 would process the conversions +/- automatically. -- User:Docu

A few comments:
  • User:Egil has already made a specific coor template argument for mountains. Check out Template:Geolinks-US-mountain and Template:Geolinks-US-start.
  • The dm template would destroy information that we currently have: I've gone to considerable effort to findthe location of mountains down to the second, and I don't see why that information should be thrown out.
  • Experimenting with this, the dms template is too sometimes wide and doesn't fit within the 305 pixel wide box. If we must use one line for the coordinates, we'd have to widen the box somewhat. I don't know if that would break the layout of the articles.
  • Is there any way to keep latitude & longitude on separate lines in the infobox? We discussed this back at the beginning of the Mountain infobox, and the consensus was to have two lines.
  • This also seems redundant with the use of Template:Geolinks-US-mountain. If we decide to do this, should we just drop use of that template in the External Links section?
-- hike395 17:42, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  1. Depending on the available precision, we would convert to {{coor dm}} or {{coor dms}} (see Wikipedia:Manual_of_Style_(dates_and_numbers)#Geographical_coordinates for details). No information should be lost in the conversion. Both templates link back to Template:Coor.
  2. The infobox still keeps the information on two lines if seconds are available. As the infobox has a fixed width, it wraps within the cell, e.g. Mount Baker (on my screen, at least). The information would be kept in one table cell though. Unless we make a separate template that goes into that part of the cell (including <tr><td> etc.), the information can't be kept in one place and rendered at two different places. If it's easier for the eyes, one could add "valign=top" to the "coordinates" description cell, but for "First ascent", this isn't done either.
  3. The conversion wouldn't include articles that already use the mountain infobox template.
  4. Template:Geolinks-US-mountain is somewhat redundant with Template:coor, but it wouldn't be added or removed in the conversion. All of the links should also be available on the special page.
-- User:Docu
  • I think Egil's mountain parameter make the map links on his page have the right zoom factor for mountains --- I hope you're planning on using that parameter? It wasn't clear from your suggestion.
  • Glad to hear you're planning on keeping DMS. That's great.
  • Would you consider using a special mountain template, if I can get something that preserves latitude and longitude as separate table items?
  • Mountain infobox template seems to be deprecated, anyway. It just didn't catch on. Feel free to convert over.
  • I, for one, will stop adding Geolinks-US-mountain to articles if you do the mass conversion.
- hike395 05:49, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)


Later: I made a first attempt at preserving the latitude/longitude lines at Mount Baker, using Template:coor dms mountain. What do people think? Is not having the line between the lat and long just stupid? I'll try and figure out how to put in a line there. Maybe an HTML wizard can suggest something. -- hike395 07:16, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Keeping everything on one line like above is what I like best. By far. --mav 15:49, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Keep Template:Geolinks-US-mountain - It is very nice to have those in the external links section. --mav 15:55, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
If we keep a one-line coordinate, please please please change all of the cells to have fixed width. I did an example at Mount Foraker --- the first column should be 90 pixels wide and the second should be 215 pixels wide. Otherwise, under the standard monobook skin, the HTML automatic table layout may flow the "W" or the "″ W" onto the next line, which is terrible. -- hike395 16:35, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • Converting to using the new coordinates templates looks to be a good thing. Just a few items of note thus far:
    1. I would agree that keeping lat./long. on one line looks better but this could cause problems for those pages where the precise coordinates have been provided to a couple of decimal points. I do NOT recommend that we expand the size of the infobox to beyond 305.
    2. The infobox template was unfortunately abandoned due to limitations of the MediaWiki software. We need the ability to use optional parameters so we can control what is displayed if one is not provided.
    3. hike395's suggestion that we now need to specify the column widths for the coordinates line makes me wince. I'm not disagreeing with it but I'd prefer not to have to specify specific widths (if we were using an infobox template I wouldn't have this concern).
    4. Firefox/Mozilla on the Mac has a display problem with the &prime and &Prime entities by inserting extra spacing which makes it look bad. I filed a bug on it a long time ago with Mozilla but they have yet to fix it. I'd like to see a workaround for this with the template by not using the entities.
    5. I'd suggest that Coordinates be linked to Geographic coordinate system.

RedWolf 05:39, Mar 21, 2005 (UTC)

I was playing with Mount Baker and Mount Foraker and found that we only need to specify the width of the one line, the rest of the infobox falls into place (at least in IE6, haven't checked other browsers). So, we can keep the width magic limited to just one template, and it will be OK. I don't know how else to make the coordinates look good --- RedWolf, if you know any HTML wizardry that would fix it, please speak up. -- hike395 08:10, 21 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Discussion seems to have died down, so the conclusions seems to be:

  1. User:Docu should run his D6 'bot over the Mountain Infoboxes, converting them to single lines using Template:coor dms or Template:coor dm.
  2. The parameter region:mountain should be added to the template arguments
  3. The width of the first column should be 90px and the second should be 215px (makes RedWolf wince, but no other alternatives proposed)
  4. Link "Coordinates" to Geographic coordinate system
  5. Don't use &Prime or &prime in the new row.
  6. Keep using Template:Geolinks-US-mountain in the external links section.
  • I took out the width specifications for that one line in Mount Baker (preview only) and it looked fine to me with Firefox 1.0.1 on a Mac. RedWolf 09:11, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)
Mount Baker was the place where I took the 90 pixel width from --- it never had the problem. Take a look at Mauna Loa without the width constraint (see table to right).
Mauna Loa
File:Mauna loa.jpg
Eruption of Mauna Loa, March 1984.
Elevation: 13,679 ft (4,169 m)
Coordinates: 19°28′46.3″N 155°36′09.6″W / 19.479528°N 155.602667°W / 19.479528; -155.602667
Location: Hawaii, USA
Topo map: USGS Mauna Loa
Range: Hawaiian Islands
Type: Shield volcano
Age of rock: < 200 Kyr
Easiest route: jeep trail
Last eruption: 1984
On IE6, the coordinates are split between two lines. I believe this is where I first saw a problem. -- hike395 14:34, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)
(It was Mauna Kea that I saw, but Mauna Loa has the same problem) -- hike395 14:50, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)


There seems to be bug in the way wiki-| table formatting renders the templates. The usual <td> format renders correctly the & nbsp; of Template:coor dms correctly. -- User:Docu
It's not the nbsp --- that seems OK in IE6: the 09.6 and the W appear on the same line. The problem is that there is a line break between the minutes and the seconds of longitude (at least under IE6). And I think that's pretty bad. If there was some way of saying (in HTML), "do not put line breaks in here", that would be preferable to fixed width. -- hike395 19:27, 27 Mar 2005 (UTC)
In Firefox 1.0.1, the "W" and the url image are on the next line. Looking at the HTML source, there is no &nbsp;before the W. There is also a <span> being used for the url. I'm not quite sure how that exactly fits into the result with it being used inside table data. RedWolf 19:44, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)
I also get a different result when in Preview mode. The entire longitude is on a separate line in preview mode but after I save it, it reverts back to what I describe above. RedWolf 19:46, Mar 27, 2005 (UTC)
In #March 21 revision of Template:Coor dms I suggest to remove the &nbsp; that was recently included. I think this should fix the problem for some of the tables. -- User:Docu
Doesn't fix it for Mauna Loa (see right). Can we agree on using width=90px for the first column, width=215px for the second? -- hike395 05:46, 30 Mar 2005 (UTC)
It hasn't been done yet, I tried a version with the change hard-coded below. -- User:Docu
After saving it: No that doesn't work either, as it wraps the "N". Seems to be a bug or a feature of that particular table format. I don't mind adding width=90px. -- User:Docu

Well, one possibility is the table to the left: putting nbsp between every entity except not after the N/S hemisphere. The result is that the coordinates are split readably on two lines. I could support this, too. -- hike395 04:51, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)

After saving it: That doesn't work either! What's wrong with preview mode, anyway? I retract my suggestion: I think we have to use width=90px -- hike395 04:52, 31 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Mauna Loa
File:Mauna loa.jpg
Eruption of Mauna Loa, March 1984.
Elevation: 13,679 ft (4,169 m)
Coordinates: 19° 28′ 46.3″ N 155° 36′ 09.6″ W
Location: Hawaii, USA
Topo map: USGS Mauna Loa
Range: Hawaiian Islands
Type: Shield volcano
Age of rock: < 200 Kyr
Easiest route: jeep trail
Last eruption: 1984

Well, I'll go ahead and update the template. -- hike395 10:02, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Ok, then I will update the articles later accordingly. -- User:Docu
I converted the eight-thousanders to the coordinates formatting in template. If it's ok, I will continue with the others. -- User:Docu
Category:Montana mountains and more US mountains went quite well. I will do the remaining ones. -- User:Docu
Looks good. Mount Whitney broke onto two lines: I removed one digit of precision and it fixed it. Even though NGS gives several of digits of precision for lat/long, I doubt if they are really useful beyond 0.1″. -- hike395
Even dropping the extra digits of precision doesn't help Mount Terror (Washington) or Sunset Crater. Should we just live with the two line coordinates? Or make the infobox wider? -- hike395 17:37, 8 May 2005 (UTC)
We could drop the "Coordinates" cell, otherwise I suppose we would have to live with it. -- User:Docu
I would rather live with the two lines than expanding the infobox width. RedWolf 17:57, May 8, 2005 (UTC)
Sounds like we should just live with it. -- hike395 18:33, 8 May 2005 (UTC)
Another alternative would be to remove the space after the "°".
BTW I finished the first series. Some of the infoboxes that included two formats of coordinates weren't converted. -- User:Docu

Coordinate width

  • Two other ways to make it smaller is to use the deprecated <font> tag or use a CSS style. However, using specific small font point sizes is generally a bad idea because those who run their monitors at high resolution can find it quite difficult to read small point sizes. I would not want to see the coordinates displayed at anything smaller than how it currently shows for me using <small>. RedWolf 07:36, Apr 16, 2005 (UTC)
  • Can the "Coord" label be omitted? It should be apparent what the coordinate is. Then use the entire line for the coordinate. Variation: move the current link to Geographic coordinate system to the "Location" text below. (SEWilco 08:59, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC))
So we can try to debug it, do you have an example of a template that doesn't fit within the 305 pixel wide box? I think I made a mistake on the current Mount Baker template example --- I should have forced the second column to be 215px wide. I wonder if that would fix the problem. -- hike395 16:58, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
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