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Coastline paradox

Hello! I am about to continue the discussion ("June 2026 Removals") on this page about the two sections, "Solutions" and "Criticisms and misunderstandings". The core reference here is the paper by McNamara et al (MNea), which I think is extremely problematical. I wonder if you have access to the full paper, and could check some things for me? I have read the summary, and the reviews in the cited references, plus this one . As far as I can see, the "new perspective" offered by MNea is simply to ignore the counterintuive result which the "paradox" refers to, and assert the naive intuition which the paradox shows is incorrect. Do they begin the paper by at least summarising the result in a way that suggests they understand it? All of the sources I have looked at are muddled: they introduce other issues (tides and so forth) which are also problems, but distract from the basic point. The geographyrealm source quotes:

The second is addressing the measurement of all the concavities of a coastline as a measurement of their spans. The authors argued that the “concept of ‘‘span’’ is well defined in other branches of engineering.”

The last sentence is frankly bizarre; they do not define what they mean by "concavity", but taken to its logical conclusion this would mean measuring the length of the convex hull. I don't think that would go down well with the Sulawesi tourist board. ... or if it were somehow possible for me to see the whole paper it would greatly help. Anyway, please let me know what you think. Imaginatorium (talk) 19:38, 10 August 2026 (UTC)

I'll have to take a look later, but the source is available on the authors researchgate GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 04:58, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Great - thanks. I will look at this; no great rush. Imaginatorium (talk) 07:14, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

If you are interested in this topic and have legitimate criticism of this papers conclusion or methodology, it could be a potential opportunity for real world publication. You should consider doing that, possibly even an article in that journal as a direct response to this one. Response papers are really useful and important. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 16:57, 11 August 2026 (UTC)

Thanks - that's an interesting thought. My last academic publication was around 40 years ago, though curiously I did work on a project with the Geography dept in remote sensing. I have tried to read the McNamara paper, but it is really hard; not just mathematically inaccurate, more antimathematical. I'll make some comments on the article talk page. Imaginatorium (talk) 12:23, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

@Imaginatorium no problem. I believe I'm the one who added the citation. I believe the Journal of Coastal Research is reputable and was summarizing what I saw in the article, not checking it for accuracy. Theory around the Coast Line Paradox is admittedly a bit outside my normal area of work, I know of it because of the implications in cartography, but don't spend much thought on the particulars. I probably wouldn't catch the mathematical inaccuracies myself unless they were incorrect calculations and I was personally running the numbers, and I did not do that in this case.

Generally speaking, the "solution" I know most cartographers are using is based on an engineering perspective. Essentially, at a certain point, increased accuracy gives diminishing returns, so if we can find a "good enough" accuracy, and agree on it, we can approximate what the coastline would be. Two discussions I've seen in a conference were a time geography framework, and a metaphor that dismissed the problem. The time geography approach stated that while a coastline could be "infinitely" measured, the time it takes to walk it wouldn't be. Using a "real world" unit like stride and how long it would take a person to walk the high tide line would give us a pretty good idea of the coastline. The metaphor related to the value of pi, where although it is an infinite decimal sequence, the benefit of adding decimals after a certain point offers very little utility. The "solution" is to include the unit of measure used to create the vector for the coastline on the map, similar to including projection and scale, so a person who is comparing a map at 1 KM and 1 meter knows the different "lengths" are an artifact of the unit used. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 12:37, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

All this is to say, I trusted that the published content was accurate and included it without checking accuracy. If it isn't accurate, that really should be published somewhere, but doing so would be slightly outside my personal academic lane at this point. If you have detected fatal flaws, it would be worth bringing it to the journals attention. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 12:56, 3 September 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I am still thinking about this, and I'll try to start more discussion on the talk page. Frankly, the McNamara paper is nonsense (the IP who removed this stuff was right). Reading it reminds me of when I used to argue with cranks about infinity on the sci.math newsgroup, but when the paper has been published in a real journal I do actually get angry at bits of it. I will try to start writing a summary of the most salient issues. I'm also trying to get a copy of Mandelbrot's original book; I rather wonder if he was a bit sloppy in his presentation, which could leave bits which someone who really did not grasp the overall argument could pick on. In particular there is a lot of talk about how coastlines are "not really infinite". Anyway, over to the talk page. Imaginatorium (talk) 16:54, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

Make sure you are familiar with the literature around Vector graphics as they apply to GIS/Cartography. A vector point in GIS is an precise point in space with XYZ coordinates but no area, and a vector line is an line with length but no depth/width created by connecting these precise points. My understanding is that this can cause the coastline paradox on a computer, but at the most extreme, this is not going to be able to capture reality as the Planck length exists. The paper mentions something like this: "once the existence of some smallest unit of measurement is identified (whether it be a water molecule or sensor pixel), the exponential growth of the object’s perimeter with respect to area disappears. The limit of the measurement of finite parts then becomes trivial; it is just the sum of all the lengths that comprise the object’s perimeter." This is an issue between practical application and what we can do in theory or model on computers. While the paradox is interesting when taken to the extreme, the real practical problem for cartographers is that someone using kilometers and someone using miles as the smallest unit will end up with different lengths. I think the paper is discussing the practical implications/issues, while you might be focused on the theoretical extremes it can be taken to. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 19:49, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

Hello! I am still working on this. I've been a bit distracted recently by the latest "At last an accurate map!" nonsense. And I see that I am talking to someone who knows someone who has met Mark Monmonier. I bought his book "Drawing the line" decades ago, more or less by accident, and wrote an ancient web page about the Gall-Peters projection that caused the fuss last time. (https://imaginatorium.org/books/maps.htm if you are interested).

Anyway, I now have a copy of Mandelbrot's book The fractal geometry of nature. Hmm. Within ten minutes of opening it I found a (printer's) error: two diagrams are interchanged. No big deal, yet, the book really is a bit idiosyncratic. I expected discussions of how fractals actually arise in nature, with illustrations, but as far as I can see there are no photographic images at all, just mathematical (computer generated) illustrations, plus a few works of art. And I was led to expect a copy of the 1967 paper on the Coastline of Britain included verbatim, which it isn't. His writing style is somehow not very persuasive; he knows he is right, which he is, of course, and just proclaims from on high. I am beginning though to see how a not very mathematically minded reader could find this off-putting.

But it really is not a question of theory against practice. The whole point is that this was all triggered by the practical realisation that no-one can find how long the coast of Australia is. There is no such thing as "the length of the coastline of Australia". Ironically, by the end of their paper McNamara et al confirm this, probably without realising that is what they have done. I'm putting together a summary of the problems, and I'll get back to you when it has some sort of shape. Imaginatorium (talk) 19:05, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

I met Monmonier only briefly; I sought him out at the AAG conference to see him speak and get him to sign my copy of How to Lie with Maps. I took a photograph with him, and a cropped version of it (to remove myself from the photo) is the one I used on his article. Nice man, as a master student, he at least feigned legitimate interest in my work (maybe he was legitimately interested, I can't say) and gave me more of his time then I was worth discussing some of his. I'm sure he is used to geography fanboys though. I'm responsible for a sizable amount of the material on Wikipedia about him, and am glad he is becoming a more recognizable name.

If the "accurate map" is the UN thing, yeah I'm a bit annoyed by it. Mostly, people acting like equal area projections are a new invention, and that this 2018 projection makes some significant contribution. Whenever map stuff hits the public consciousness, this is the result.

Printer errors are common, at the last minute, things change for whatever reason and it can cause cascading changes no one catches until it is already in print. The problems you note are why it is important to review multiple sources on a topic, and seek out critical discussion of those sources. For example, Reviewed Work: The Fractal Geometry of Nature by Benoit B. Mandelbrot discusses the book you mention in a bit of detail. As the review is published in The American Mathematical Monthly, it is about as reliable a source as we can expect on Wikipedia, and can help frame criticism without having to do the original thought on our own. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 19:32, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

Incomplete and I think outdated perhaps GAN review

Hi... I only just noticed that Talk:Christopher Mellon/GA1 was remarked on by you here when you made it, but I apparently didn't see it till now?

• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Christopher_Mellon/GA1&oldid=1290289390

But you also seem to have not closed/failed the WP:GAN itself, so it's been somehow sat for almost 1 year unseen?

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:WhatLinksHere/Talk:Christopher_Mellon/GA1
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_article_nominations#Politics_and_government

Do you mind closing that older open GAN? Thanks! — Very Polite Person (talk/contribs) 15:52, 15 September 2026 (UTC)

Sorry, that was my first attempt at review. Trying to get involved with these processes is difficult, I mostly want to write GA, but see to do so you need to help review. I was treating it like an RfC where the closer isn't the reviewer, and thought someone who was more experienced might take issue with my assessment. I'll try to figure out how to close. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 17:46, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

Okay, I think I closed it. Let me know if I didn't do it right, sorry for causing you issues. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 17:55, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

A cup of coffee for you!

Maybe I should have provided this a few days ago, when you were first taken to ANI, but maybe I should do this now because I had a new coffee maker delivered IRL to my house. A cup of a hot stimulating beverage is what you need after a silly trip to a noticeboard. Robert McClenon (talk) 19:28, 24 September 2026 (UTC)

Thanks! I appriciate the thought and you contributing to the discussion there. ANI just got archived, so I don't think it is going to go anywhere. I generally don't like being in the spotlight there obviously, and have been trying to keep the Superpower page from showing up there as I generally believe the consequences that people get hit with can be more damaging to the project then helpful. Glad it didn't boomerang on the poster, don't want anyone getting banned over heated talk page nonsense. I am sorry that you've been exposed to the drama on that page, I'm sure it has been frustrating for you as well. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 00:44, 25 September 2026 (UTC)

The fly on the page banner should have a feature so that if the cursor is positioned over it and clicked, it squishes. Is the fly visible to mobile users?

I think that particular WP:ANI thread was the work of a user who takes good-faith disagreement too personally. The Superpower page also has users who want to talk, and who want to talk about talking. It is likely to pop up again because it still has the same users. If it pops up again, one approach might be to make it a contentious topic. Robert McClenon (talk) 03:52, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

I stole the fly from someone. I added a link to it though as a bit of an easter egg. I believe it's visible to mobile users, but not sure.

As far as I can tell, it already is listed as a contentious topic (at least, it has the talk page banner). I've seen a lot of armchair analyst debates, and this topic is like a magnet for that type of discussion. People who talk about geopolitics like sports teams and want to debate which team is the best, which team was the best, and what theoretically could/would happen in various fictitious scenarios. Because this term is poorly defined, and because people think they have a good definition of it, they begin an OR debate about military and economic statistics. Lots of petty nationalism tends to come out during this, just like sports team fans. The argument I've seen from a few people I know that work a bit closer with this sort of thing then I do is that the term is essentially no longer meaningful. Nuclear weapons have deadlock the biggest militaries, and international trade has everyone so interdependent that there isn't really a true power that can throw its weight around like in the past. List of the largest trading partners of China has two supranational organizations, and then the United States as number 1. The List of the largest trading partners of the United States has China as the third largest trading partner. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. were not interconnected in this way. It wasn't possible for Soviet citizens to chat with American citizens on internet forums. There isn't a precedent for what we have now, and we will probably need to wait for the benefit of hindsight to actually understand the current situation. I haven't seen a source state this quite as eloquently as I've seen in lecture though. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 04:55, 26 September 2026 (UTC)

... or a glass of something

I'd just drafted another cartography-ignorant question (another in the series "How the hell can I make this rather silly map of mine a bit less risibly unreadable?") and was about to post it at WT:WikiProject Maps when I saw your lengthy response there to my somewhat flippant remark. I'm putting aside some time for its reading and digestion. Meanwhile, thank you for the considerable time you must have put into it. -- Hoary (talk)^WWU 👍︎ 03:00, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

Pixels and things

On Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Maps you made an odd remark: "Fundamentally, the files you're using to make maps should not be SVGs." Um, don't you mean "should not be pixel based"? Or whatever... Imaginatorium (talk) 09:16, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

President Trump holding a hurricane projection map with the projection expanded into Alabama with a Sharpie marker

The way Wikipedia approaches maps is fundamentally problematic. Taking a finished product, and making edits to it using graphic design software is an approach that is, at best, amateur. Essentially, the way we are approaching making maps is disconnected from how maps are made by cartographers. Using SVGs encourages this by storing it in a vector format that is easy for others to make changes to. The map is a finished product, and it would be better to use something like TIFF to avoid people opening up the vector file and making haphazard changes. For example, generally, when you're making a map, the data is stored in something like a Shapefile or (or a feature class within a geodatabase). These vector files have coordinates associated with them, and when they are exported as an image, those coordinates generally are not associated with the final output. Using the output map without the coordinates is a recipe for misleading maps. I've included an image of president trump from the Hurricane Dorian–Alabama controversy where he drew on a map with a sharpie. As a professional cartographers, seeing how maps are edited on Wikipedia looks no different from this. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 17:45, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

Cartography for Dummies

(That's me!) Thank you for the long and thoughtful response at WT:WikiProject Maps. It merits as thoughtful a response as my ignorance permits; but this is somewhat long, so I'm posting it here instead. Hope you don't mind.

• you have to choose the type of map to use: Indeed so, but I'd guestimate that a large percentage of maps here have this or that among a very limited number of purposes. (One of these being to show where such-and-such a hamlet/village/town/city is within a larger area.)
• you generally choose an appropriate Map projection, Scale (map), and an acceptable level of Cartographic generalization:
  • Projections have of course been newsworthy of late. Certainly the choice among them matters greatly for a large area of the globe (e.g. SE Asia) or an area in the far north or south, but does it for a map of e.g. Laos?
  • Cartographic generalization could easily erase, say, Bosnia's petite coastline. Does mapping software perhaps have an option to avoid generalization over any among a set of vigorously/fanatically defended distinctions?
  • Google Maps either doesn't provide an indication of scale or keeps it well hidden. (Of course copyright considerations anyway disqualify Google Maps.)
• indication of direction: As in "Up is north"? In most contexts, if I were shown a modern map of what I was told was Umbria (whose shape I don't remember), I'd assume that up was north. (This would not apply to, say, a local map for pedestrians on a Japanese sidewalk.) But an arrow pointing north (or wherever) takes little space, so why not provide it.
• documenting the sources, projection, date of creation, and map author (... this is about accountability when the map inevitably leaks and is used somewhere outside Wikipedia. For my first map, I used c:File:Italy relief location map.jpg. Its provenance is described in some detail. I confess that I don't understand much of this detail and can't judge its adequacy. But I'm pretty sure it's sound by the standards of Commons, where the ignorant and/or lazy routinely upload spoils from the web as their "own work". (Not that other crap exists justifies adding more crap.)
• people do not want to learn how to do it "right," they just want to slap together an image and get head pats Hey, we people are not your undergraduates! (Not the dimmer ones, anyway.)
• The British Cartographic Society lists "Competence" and "Responsibility" in their code of ethics. Wikipedia does not enforce any form of competence on the cartographers: It doesn't do so on the editors of text, either.
• (the instructions to make maps are not how competent professionals do it), or responsibility when someone makes a really bad map. There is really no check to ensure the map is following any conventions or avoiding mistakes that can mislead users. [...] Uneducated editors would rather keep misleading garbage then nothing at all. Here, maps and text may differ. For text, plenty of editors do check. Many of these seem monomaniacal (obsessed with "Oxford commas" or whatever) but plenty don't. They're hardly enough for the deluge of (textually) crappy articles, but they do have some effect.
• The use of templates literally forces us to let defaults drive design. Yes, but for many purposes, perhaps most, there are alternative templates, or alternatives to templates. (Incidentally, they're hardly new. I'm looking at my copy of an old -- 14th ed, 1993 -- Chicago Manual of Style. I doubt that it anywhere uses the term "template", but de facto templates are what it provides. Often, alternative sets of templates, and templates that bring benefits but that I wouldn't have thought of by myself.) Provision of templates perhaps nudges mediocre editors (such as myself) towards informativeness, and then the templates regurgitate the information in an organized form. (That said, I don't think I've ever created an article with an infobox, or added an infobox to an article. I've never wanted to do so.)

-- Hoary (talk)^WWU 👍︎ 10:46, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

Answers:

Simplified view of contiguous US UTM zones, projected with Lambert conformal conic.

Albers with Tissot's Indicatrices of Distortion

1. Locator maps are a type of map that shows the general location of an area of interest, so that would be the type you are talking about. There are some things to consider with such a map, such as audience familiarity and how much you are showing for context relative to what you are trying to show the location of. For example, if your audience doesn't know much about the geography of central Africa, and you want to give them context of where something is on the globe, you may choose a world map rather then regional. When you are making a locator map, it is important to actually show the place accurately. One issue I've seen is people will use a point symbol that is so large it covers a geographic area larger then the point of interest. Another is that people will eyeball a map and place a point generally where they think it should go, like placing a digital thumbtack on a board. This may or may not be accurate. This is possibly something that your map is doing.
2. The current discussion around projection is a bit frustrating for me. The general public has little idea about them, but it is easy to feel good about the Equal Earth Projection because they are told it is solving a problem. The issue is that it really isn't doing anything new, and the real problems with projections are still not widely addressed. The Mercator projection is not generally used for world maps today, and there have been equal area projections available for centuries. The current one is from 2018, and really feels like a nothing more then a way for the authors to boost their citation indexes. Real issues include the use of Web Mercator (Different from the generic Mercator projection) as the default for ALL Web mapping. It is difficult to change this projection, even if you want to, and is wildly inappropriate for thematic maps. When it comes to projection choice, the scale and location of a point of interest matters. For example, the Universal Transverse Mercator coordinate system (another variant of Mercator) solves some of the problems intrinsic to the general Mercator by dividing the world into Zones, each with a projection specific to the Zone that minimizes distortion within the Zone. The United States has the State Plane Coordinate System which has divides the United States into 125 geographic zones, and uses a different projection/coordinate system for each zone. Using the wrong projection can make an area of interest appear oddly oriented within your map frame, grossly distorted, or completely unrecognizable. For example, a common map projection used to show the United States is the North America Albers equal-area conic projection, which centers the Albers projection on North America so the North is generally "top" of map. If you used the North America projection for Laos, the North of Laos would not be facing the top of the map.
3. The accountability issue is something people are not really thinking through, but I do have an example. Here is an article titled Trump, Tariffs, Canada and the Politics of Discontent published in The Tyee. If you look at the article, the author used one of my maps from Commons. I don't mind this, that is the point after all, however if I had not included my username I would have been depending on the author doing the "right thing" and documenting where they found it within the article. This would make it hard for someone to ask questions of the original author. This can become an issue like we saw with Australia fires: Misleading maps and pictures go viral.
4. Coastline paradox is related to cartographic generalization. To answer the question, no, there is not a set solution. This means a person who is haphazardly creating maps is very likely to make a mess. One common mistake is choosing a boundary file that is meant to be used at a global scale and using it to show a local area.
5. The assumption that "North is up" relies on the reader knowing that convention. There are a ton of maps, particularly maps of very local areas, that do not place North at the top. Wikipedia has an international audience, and even if a small percentage of the population does not know the convention that North is up, that translates to a very large number of people. In my cartography classes, I have met a surprising number of students who don't know it, and it only really comes out because we are directly addressing the topic. Most people who don't know aren't making us aware of it on the daily. North arrows are useful, compass roses are better as even more people don't know where East and West are in relation to North and South (you'd probably be depressed to see this. Annecdotally, on my exams to test this, I told students they would need to label a compass rose, told them how to do it, gave them a study guide with it, and guaranteed it would be on the exam. I made it enough points that doing it wrong to troll would cause a painful grade drop. Generally, between 1 and 3 percent of students could not do this in what I can only say is the most ideal of circumstances).
6. Google maps has a scale bar that changes dynamically with how you zoom.
7. If you want to see how bad the source issue is, it isn't hard to find examples. One is the locator map for Sudan.

   

   Sudan (orthographic projection) highlighted

   The source is given as modified from another Wikipedia map. That map is sourced as "own work." It includes some other maps that were used to make the boundary changes, and I suspect the changes made are user generated approximations. When this is done for tourist destinations, it isn't that big of a deal, but these are areas of international conflict.
8. people do not want to learn how to do it "right," they just want to slap together an image and get head pats The problem isn't you, I'm a bit salty from previous discussions on this topic. Imagine, you have a Ph.D. on a very niche topic, have papers published on it, you teach classes on it, and you provide people on Wikipedia with sources about why what they are doing is a problem, and met with hostility and dismissal.For example.
9. If people were inserting grammatical errors or misinformation into Wikipedia, it would be reverted, and if they kept doing it they might get sanctioned for disruptive editing. When it comes to maps, it is pretty much anything goes. Wikipedia:Five pillars includes "Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view" and "Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute" (the latter states "Respect copyright laws and never plagiarize from any sources."). The literature is pretty unanimous that maps are not "content neutral," and the bias of the cartographer is always there. When it comes to plagiarism, people seem to think that the boundary files organizations publish are inconsequential and unnecessary to cite. This is wrong both because plagiarism is wrong, and because the boundaries created by organizations have their biases baked in, and are making choices regarding generalization that skew the way the world looks.
10. When it comes to maps, when someone DOES check, there is significant pushback to even basic criticism. Again, I tried to get maps that are making a mistake that is described as "misleading" and "misinformation" within the literature, but was told that they would not be deleted unless they were replaced with something else.
11. Map templates force a one size fits all solution. Generally, when making a map, it is best to make the map show exactly what you intend.
12. Above, I showed a picture of Donald Trump using a sharpie to draw on a map. This is what most Wikipedia maps look like to me, although that might be a bit generous to the Wikipedia maps. By using software instead of a sharpie, they make a more convincing product, which is more likely to be taken seriously instead of getting ridiculed by users. This makes it much easier to push a POV or misinformation.

GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 18:50, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

This is interesting stuff indeed. (I must owe you at least a couple more bottles of Orval.) A late and partial response, as my sleep deficit caught up with me today.

I'm primarily thinking of the kind of "location within" map that we see in the article Bari: "Show map of Italy" / "Show map of Apulia" / "Show map of Europe". (I have trouble believing that more than the tiniest number of readers would want to know where Bari is but not know where Italy is within Europe. So the third option seems superfluous. OTOH I suppose its provision is harmless.) But I assume that viewers of any of these three maps will understand that the red blob ("red pog") is a conventional addition intended not to depict the size or shape of Bari but instead merely its position. (But maybe I'm too optimistic.)

It's time to fess up on how I found the coordinates of the seventy or so places within the map within the article Gironimo!. Despite knowing that Google Maps' ascription of names (and coordinates?) can be problematic, I used, yes, GM. Thus I found coordinates for, say, Carsoli simply by asking GM for "Carsoli", reading ...+Italy/@42.0975041,13.0837598,15z/data=... within its long URL, and simplifying this to 42.098°N, 13.084°E. The third decimal place seems excessively precise for my humble purpose (in a map that's of non-contentious matters and whose later repurposing is unimaginable), especially given my ignorance of how GM computes coordinates. (Wild guess #1: the centroid of the peculiarly shaped area of the Comune of Carsoli.)

people will eyeball a map and place a point generally where they think it should go, like placing a digital thumbtack on a board. Yes, I have a more or less conscious assumption that, if not obstructed by mountains or sea, a town will have grown in various directions from what's now its center. So for various towns I was tempted to stick my thumbtack in the area labeled centro storico. (The assumption is of course wrong: the centro storico of the very city where I now sit has been obliterated several times over, but its site is distinctly east of the centre.) Anyway, looking for this centro would have added a minor chore to the method I did use. -- Hoary (talk)^WWU 👍︎ 11:33, 3 October 2026 (UTC)

Animated Dot Density map of COVID-19 cases in Connecticut between March 21st 2020 and May 21st 2020. Data Published by the Connecticut Department of Public Health.

But maybe I'm too optimistic It is not bad to be optimistic, but the "polish" on maps is mostly ensuring stupid people don't misunderstand something basic. For example, this animated dot density map I made a while back has a * in the legend, followed by "dots are randomly placed within town boundaries." This is because I got yelled at for "showing the private health information of people with COVID-19" by someone with a lot of degrees but not a lot of map use experience. They thought it was the actual home address. I've had arguments with people about silly map mistakes, and when they asked me for citations, I gave them papers (plural) I had written on it. They tried to argue that they "didn't think that is what the author meant," and when I had them read the list of authors, they only doubled down harder. I've seen people think blue always meant water, people who thought the dots for cities were the actual extent of the city, and had junior level students that couldn't tell me which way "East" is on a map half way through a GIS course (To be fair, I assumed they would know this, so didn't teach them). When I can, I use both metric and American Imperial units in my scale bars, both because I know users will exist who can't use one or the other, and because I don't like having people think I'm making a political point by using Kilometers. Anticipating stupidity and misunderstandings avoids annoying conversations. Other things to consider include things like making sure maps are legible to the color blind population and cultural sensitivities/associations with specific colors.

Your method for finding the coordinates is pretty common. It probably also is technically WP:OR, but I've already seen that people don't really care when I point that out. I'm not sure what all the points are, but I'd approach the problem by finding a shapefile for all the towns in Italy. If I was being lazy, I would probably use something like QuickMapTools, but could probably get a better source if I needed. Then, I'd use a Spatial query to select only the towns that I wanted, export them, make a new column in the attribute table for stage, and symbolize it. Then, grab a boundary file for Italy, probably subset from the US State Department borders. Basemap's exist, but grabbing an SRTM file for Italy and creating a relief map is easy enough. Then just slap a layout together. Probably like, an hour of work. Citations would be: Boundary file, towns file, SRTM dataset, and whatever source used to decide which towns to include/exclude from query. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 12:38, 3 October 2026 (UTC)

I got yelled at for "showing the private health information of people with COVID-19" That allegation is nuts. Let's suppose for a moment that the position of a dot did indicate the position of an infection. (i) It's hard to see just what's going on in the more evenly reddened towns; but all, or virtually all, of the sparsely scattered dots elsewhere last but a single day. Did all those who were affected immediately move house, or did they immediately die? No, surely the mortality rate wasn't that high. (ii) Also, the unit is a town, an online encyclopedia tells me that most towns in CT have five-figure populations (and that even the least populous has over seven hundred), and zooming in isn't possible; I don't know how anyone could identify an (of course fundamentally misunderstood) dot with a particular building.

But many Wikipedia editors appear to have a propensity for indignation so great as to override any propensity for reasoning.

I did worry a little about comprehensibility for the colorblind, but told myself that colorblindness is usually only partial (and that my map anyway didn't attempt to show anything important).

QuickMapTools looks very promising; thank you for the tip. -- Hoary (talk)^WWU 👍︎ 23:16, 3 October 2026 (UTC)

To be fair to that particular person, we were working with a very sensitive dataset (30K children's medical records), and they had seen some of the maps I made for internal use only that very much would have been a violation if they were published. The difference between a geocoded address and a dot density map was lost on them.

On the QuickMapTools, you'd have to check their source, but they do offer the ability to download a CSV file for all the towns that includes Lat Long. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 23:21, 3 October 2026 (UTC)

just fyi

its odd people say 2020s as superpower beginning of talks

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7926076/ - China's rise to a global economic superpower accelerated dramatically when it joined the World Trade Organization in December 2001

With major debates by early 2010

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2012/11/scholars-agree-china-not-superpower Moxy🍁 17:15, 6 October 2026 (UTC)

I agree. I believe the article reflect the timeline of the debate pretty well as it is. It specifically mentions early 2000s and 2010s. The sentence changed to mention the 2020s was in addition to these points, and really only diluted the sentence on opinions it is not a superpower by reiterating opinions exist that it is. Many people on the talk page want opinions that China and the United States are not superpowers, as well as opinions that other entities are, to be removed and present a definitive stance. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 17:42, 6 October 2026 (UTC)

as I said before your doing a great job.. would love to be more involved but I simply don't have time to deal with all the meat puppets and single purpose accounts. It would be a full-time job as you can tell. Moxy🍁 17:48, 6 October 2026 (UTC)

It is frustrating. I have not edited Wikipedia as much over the past few months because of that page. I had a few articles I wanted to create over the summer, but every time I set time aside to work on them, I'd have a bunch of pings from it. The biggest issue is that there are multiple POV on the topic, and it is a magnet for armchair analysts. While there isn't agreement on which POV to push, there is a large number of people that want to present a single POV, and the boring argument for discussing the term and the various perspectives on it doesn't attract the passionate editors like those arguing "China IS definitely a superpower according to these three sources I found," or "It definitely IS NOT according to these three sources I found." GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 17:52, 6 October 2026 (UTC)

Congratulations !

You managed to successfully lock even talk page of superpower, which means until I open a account, I cannot edit, add, or respond to anyone on either pages. Gradually if you're successful in restricting few remaining sane contributor's, you'll be having a monopoly on pushing you're biased agenda on that page. Congratulations, if you consider that's a fair game. ~2026-54454-80 (talk) 16:07, 11 October 2026 (UTC)

I didn't do anything. I requested page protection for the article, and an admin agreed and took that action. I did not request protection on talk page, but an admin decided to take that action. I have no power to lock a page. If you want to edit, add, or respond, you can make an account. The current situation, where your temp account is constantly changing, makes it very hard to keep track of what you have said, and which temp accounts are actually new to the conversation. If you have a problem with it, I would recommend going to the talk page of the admins who took the action. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 20:06, 11 October 2026 (UTC)

Ok ! my apologies on that. I did create an account, & I'm back after 4 years on Wikipedia editing. AMKL18 (talk) 11:31, 20 October 2026 (UTC)

Consider using Village Pump to discuss enhancements to WP guidelines

Hi. I noticed that you have very strong opinions about Wikipedia policies, specifically:

1. You believe that the map guidelines are inadequate and permit poor-quality maps to be used in articles;
2. You believe that citations should list all authors, and feel that using "et al" should be prohibited.

I, too, feel many WP policies are deficient. The best place to discuss improvements are at WP:Village Pump, WP:Manual of style, WikiCommons Village Pump, or similar forums.

You have made comments in the past directed at other editors suggesting that their edits or maps are: "bad" , "unethical", "disrespectful", "the maps you are making are not particularly good", "making a mess", "one of the worst", "more bad maps being spammed", "do you just assume you know everything?" , "it is a really, really bad idea", " probably one of the worst and most potentially damaging map related ideas I've ever seen", and "digital equivalent of giving children a map and having them use crayons on it".

Those kinds of comments may run afoul of the WP:Civility policy – particularly when the edits and material are fully compliant with WP and WikiCommons guidelines.

Again, it is okay to be unhappy with WP guidelines, but directing your ire at specific editors (or the material they have produced) could offend editors. And it wastes time ... time which could be better spent at Village Pump gathering support for strengthening the map guidelines.

Pinging Hoary, Cmglee, and Timeshifter. Noleander (talk) 20:02, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

I've been to the village pump, people want to avoid instruction creep, and generally I'm told to address the concern on the relevant talk page. When I do that, people will say to address it broadly at the pump, the cycle continues, and the problem is never solved.

We have Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Spelling but it is not exhaustive. Imagine someone decided to ignore spelling conventions unless they were defined by the Wikipedia MOS, and didn't understand why their spelling choices were being criticized. Saying that they are "making a mess" would be an understatement. Many maps on Wikipedia violate cartographic conventions in the same way a misspelled word violates English conventions. Most maps on Wikipedia violate strict readings of Wikipedia:Core content policies, specifically in regards to WP:NOR, however I think this goes over most editors heads. Per Wikipedia:Editing policy, "a lack of content is better than misleading or false content." Verifiably, we host maps that do things the literature describes as misleading. For example:

Whenever a map of count data makes sense, perhaps to place a map of rates in perspective, graphic theory condemns using a choropleth map because its ink (or toner) metaphor is misleading.

— Mark Monmonier, Lying with Maps

Yet we have a whole category on Commons filled with choropleth maps using count data. When I tried to address this more broadly, I was told that we would not delete the misleading content unless it was replaced with something, because when it comes to maps, misleading is apparently better then nothing. We have maps where international borders are edited, symbols are placed on a point location, and choropleth map colors and breaks are made, by editors in Inkscape. These maps are bad. Making these maps is unethical. These maps are not particularly good. Many people making maps don't want to put the time in to learn how to do so, because learning how to do so is hard. It is hard to do critique on maps if you can't tell someone the map is bad, and if sources describe a practice as unethical, then I don't think it is necessary to soften the word, or pretend the lack of thought put into Wikipedia policy on the matter is an excuse.

As for the use of et al, yes, I think that it is both disrespectful to the authors and that using it is unnecessarily excluding information that could be useful to a user. Don't really think that a change like that is worth taking to the pump. I've never seen that approach in a reference section before. I raised the point because a change was made to the articles established citation style, and I disagree with the change made. I don't think there are any civility issues with that comment. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 21:26, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

I understand that you are not satisfied with several WP guidelines and conventions. But WP has a shortage of editors, and we all need to work together to make sure they stay around. Be advised that continued personal insults directed at editors – especially when their work is consistent with WP guidelines – is cause for a report at WP:Administrators' noticeboard for viloating the WP:Civility policy. Noleander (talk) 22:59, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

I'd need to see difs for those comments, as I don't remember every conversation I've had on this (it is a few). That said, I will try to tone down rhetoric, but believe most of these are fairly tame and were probably part of a large conversation where I was trying to convey the severity of a problem most people don't know exists. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 01:56, 17 October 2026 (UTC)

WP:Civility starts (after markup-stripping): "Civility is part of Wikipedia's code of conduct and one of its five pillars. Stated simply, editors should always treat each other with consideration and respect." Note "each other", not "each other's edits". True, WP:Civility doesn't give carte blanche to comments on edits -- e.g. within edit summaries, "snide comments" are out. "Do you just assume you know everything?" (above) sounds pretty snide; however, "the maps you are making are not particularly good" (above) is remarkably gentle. And if I have a really, really bad idea (as I probably do, from time to time), then before I implement it further I should be persuasively and non-snidely told that it's a really, really bad idea. ¶ That said, if Wikipedia has a systemic problem, the problem is better raised centrally than on individual article/user talk pages. -- Hoary (talk)^WWU 👍︎ 22:44, 16 October 2026 (UTC)

I don't actually know the context of "Do you just assume you know everything?" I've had some pretty long discussions about maps, so I'm not sure where that is from, who I said it to, or what was around it. That said, the main problem is that when making maps, there is a lot to know. Cartography is heavily impacted by the Dunning–Kruger effect (not just on Wikipedia, this week in my remote sensing class, I pulled up a peer-reviewed article and had the students critique the maps in it. They were pretty bad, as in, undergrads were questioning how they got published). On Wikipedia, people are assuming they know enough to make maps without formal education or any evidence of trying to educate themselves. The way Wikipedia discusses making maps from the project is divorced from how professional ones are made. I have tried to raise it in a few venues, unfortunately, the amount of reading someone would need to do to participate in such a discussion is more then most editors are willing to do. The broad discussions generally have editors telling me to raise the issue on individual article/map talk pages, and then on those talk pages I get told to raise the issue more broadly. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 01:53, 17 October 2026 (UTC)