CZ Talk:Geography Workgroup/Gazetteer

Well, I thought a gazetteer was a dictionary of places. So you could say that a really big encyclopedia contains gazetteer entries (in that sense) and thus replaces a gazetteer. An index of places, however, can also be called a gazetteer. "Index" usually means "alphabetical list," although indexes can also be organized in other ways as with a topical index. So what, precisely, is the content of the proposal that we create a "gazetteer"? It is that we call any list of places, or perhaps a top-level master list like countries of the world, a "gazeteer," and perhaps also that we feel free to intermix different types of links and geographical information into the pages, again as we are doing with countries of the world?

I suspect the appeal of the "gazeteer" or "guide" proposal is that it will be useful to people to have more information than, simply, a list of countries. I agree with this.

Here is what I propose. I propose we have (mere examples offered here) World Gazeteer, North America Gazetteer, United States Gazetteer, Ohio Gazetteer, and Licking County Gazetteer. At each level our aim is, obviously, not to have every possible piece of information about things at that level of generality, but merely "the highlights"--obviously, a controversial task, but one that is open to various objective measures (such as population statistics).

The idea, then, is that at each level, we list the major political divisions, major cities, major mountains and/or mountain ranges (and other geological features), major parks, and so forth. As to what sort of information to have, I would urge you to think first and foremost of what users are to find most useful and interesting. A list of countries alphabetically is not quite necessary, because if I want to look up a country, I can use the search box for that: so how many people want or will use an alphabetical list? Organizing them by continent, and continental subdivision as in the case of Europe, Asia, and Africa, would be much more interesting. Listing them also by land area, population, GDP and cost of living would all be interesting. But ultimately, for the World Gazetteer we should choose just one listing (perhaps by continent, then alphabetical); then we can link to a page such as Country comparisons that has the aforementioned lists. We might also on World Gazeteer have lists of the major mountain ranges, cities, rivers, oceans, etc.

I think the proper place to work out this idea is CZ:Geography Workgroup or some subpage thereof. (Notice that the new CZ: namespace permits subpages.) I'll copy this mail there for further discussion.

--Larry Sanger 15:26, 13 March 2007 (CDT)

One thing that's nice about wikipedia's coverage of geographical entities is that, in the best cases, you can find lists organized in whatever manner one wants. I also think alphabetical organization is more useful than you seem to. Among other things, if I want to open up a bunch of tabs on different countries, an alphabetical list is most useful. And if the list has more information than simply the name, as Countries of the world now does, then alphabetical is also convenient. Countries of Europe or Countries of Asia would be places to have lists of countries organized by continent, I think, as well. There's no reason to assume there should be only one single list. John Kenney 16:39, 13 March 2007 (CDT)

I know it's probably not technically possible, but I would be nice to have the lists or tables re-order themselves by user preference. I'm sure your all familiar with the was Windows Explorer can order lists of files by name, size, file type etc by clicking on the header of the column. The idea would be to replicate that behaviour on our own column.

With respect to the name, I always liked the name Ptolemy used: "Geographia" - This was basically an encyclopedia of places and was a compendium a large number of other gazetteers of the time.Derek Harkness 04:11, 14 March 2007 (CDT)

Dynamic lists are apparently technically possible. See for instance this wikipedia article. I'm not sure if it's readily usable here, though, or how much work would have to be done to make it such. John Kenney 09:49, 19 March 2007 (CDT)