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I really like the picture of the state with the county highlighted. Some of the counties in California are like that. They need to be a bit smaller. But of course there is no reason that we can't have both sets of pictures, but I find that it is most useful to know where in a state it is. As for integrating them in the articles, I can easily use the rambot to add them to existing articles if you don't already have a bot. I just finished a second pass of the counties where I updated the list of cities in the counties but it only updated a subset of counties which were not up to date. It is really up to you what you want to do. If you have your own bot, you can insert the pictures. It should be really simple to do. My main concern is that the pictures are not inserted haphazardly anywhere in the article. For what its worth, I downloaded and am planning on processing all the FIPS data on counties and cities, so I may be doing a pass sometime soon updating the county information, but I don't have that scheduled in. I am a bit busy from time to time :) -- Ram-Man
I also like the idea of having locator maps but I'm with Ram-Man in stating these images should be small (ala the California counties) and placed in the correct places. Since some people are doing great work on adding adjacent county and highway lists to the geography sections of county articles, I vote to have the locator maps placed in the vast white areas to the right of these lists. Before anybody does anything though, please check out m:Wikipediatlas. IMO those maps are the best in terms of look and utility. -- mav
Unfortunately, I fear the non-commerical use clause doesn't have compatibility with the FDL. -- Ellmist Monday, November 11th, 2002
I've been working around the edges, adding or editing a few place articles. As a result I've got one recommendation and some comments:
Discussion moved from Wikipedia:Village pump by Wapcaplet 14:10 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Dunno if anyone has suggested this before; when browsing random articles, I often come across some of the many U.S. cities and counties imported by Rambot. It would be quite cool, I think, to have a small state map that indicates whereabout these cities and counties are (a dot for cities, a highlighted outline for counties, sort of like we already have for U.S. state articles). Is there a public-domain or GPL source for maps like this? If not, I don't imagine it'd be too hard for a dedicated soul to create them (just time-consuming). -- Wapcaplet 23:32 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I did find a collection of public-domain U.S. maps, including nice large county maps like this one of Ohio. They would take quite a bit of editing to reduce to an appropriate format for what I'm thinking of, but could be quite nice! If anybody knows of another public source for similar maps, let me know. I'd be interested in working on these. -- Wapcaplet 23:37 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)
It looks like there are several different practices in use. I don't know if there are any "standards", necessarily.
Of these, red on white seems to be the most common, however. Blue-on-blue looks nice but is kind of at odds with the custom of using blue for water in maps (not to mention it may be hard for some people to distinguish between shades of blue). I do think the state border should somehow be thicker, or darker, than the county borders (thicker would probably suffice, since the county borders would get pretty light at smaller sizes anyway). The only con I can see with using white for the rest of the state is that it may be hard to distinguish the state from the surrounding area at smaller sizes (especially on coastal states with small islands). This is probably not much of an issue, though, since we're just trying to show where the county is.
On balance, I'd have to agree that red on white is probably the way to go. Size is another important issue. Most states are likely to look okay at around 300 pixels wide, at most. Even [ Texas] isn't too bad at this size. However, some counties are very small, and would practically vanish at this size. Storey County, Nevada is the smallest one I can think of, but there may be tinier ones. A big state with some small counties might have troubles at this resolution. We can just make all our maps large, say, 600 pixels to be safe, and use an automated tool to resize them all. If some get too small, we can make those a bit larger. 200 pixels might be enough; we'll see how it goes. Maybe we should try a couple at that size, to see how they turn out (and whether we need to make the state border thicker or whatnot). -- Wapcaplet 14:10 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Looking good! I will gladly pitch in. For now, I will start on California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and (gulp) Alaska. I've just looked at the outline map of Alaska; many tiny counties with lots of coastline, which are quite hard to distinguish. I don't know how easy these will be to clean up, but I will give it a shot; Alaska is likely to be one of the hardest. -- Wapcaplet 17:40 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I'll email smaller-sized versions to you (since the RGB PNG files are around 60+K each). Also, I've adapted a small script (called shrink
to resize them, if you would like to use something similar:
#!/bin/bash for file in $2; do convert -size $1 "$file" -resize $1 -colors 256 "small/$file" done
Usage:
./shrink [size] "[file(s)]" ./shrink 200 "*.png"
I'm an extreme newbie at shell scripting, so you may be able to do better if you have experience with it. Anyhow, I will e-mail you a chunk of them in a day or two. I've so far finished Alaska, California, Oregon, and Washington (with Nevada soon to come). After that I'll start working my way eastward.
We should come up with a naming convention for these, too. Existing ones are like this:
Which may be a bit too long. I'm thinking something along the lines of California_San_Luis_Obispo_County.png
or even CA_San_Luis_Obispo_County.png
. What do you think?
-- Wapcaplet 23:11 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Crap. I am noticing that setting the width at a consistent 300 pixels tends to cause some size differences in terms of height. We probably should have agreed on a maximum width and height, since the tall skinny states (like Illinois, Vermont, etc.) end up looking huge at 300 pixels wide. I just compared all of the states I've done, and most are okay... Illinois and Indiana should probably be padded with whitespace on the left and right prior to resizing, so the height doesn't get out of control. -- Wapcaplet 16:20 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I've made some modified versions (using whitespace padding, so they stay at 300 pixels). To me, the following disparity is jarring (county is arbitrary):
File:TX County large.png File:IL County large.png
The above is what happens if we set a fixed width of 300 pixels, and let height vary accordingly. If we constrain them all to less than 300 pixels in height, also, it seems to keep the proportions a little better (and also keeps the file size under control). Here's the resized Illinois, which to me looks better:
Let me know what you think. -- Wapcaplet 02:48 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)
That is certainly true... the padding is something of a hack, but it won't be as visible on the resulting pages. Let me try a couple of mock-ups (see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Counties/mockups.)
By James F.
By Wapcaplet
Any chance of a link here from the image description page of all the images? Martin 12:27, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | Archive 4 | Archive 5 |
I really like the picture of the state with the county highlighted. Some of the counties in California are like that. They need to be a bit smaller. But of course there is no reason that we can't have both sets of pictures, but I find that it is most useful to know where in a state it is. As for integrating them in the articles, I can easily use the rambot to add them to existing articles if you don't already have a bot. I just finished a second pass of the counties where I updated the list of cities in the counties but it only updated a subset of counties which were not up to date. It is really up to you what you want to do. If you have your own bot, you can insert the pictures. It should be really simple to do. My main concern is that the pictures are not inserted haphazardly anywhere in the article. For what its worth, I downloaded and am planning on processing all the FIPS data on counties and cities, so I may be doing a pass sometime soon updating the county information, but I don't have that scheduled in. I am a bit busy from time to time :) -- Ram-Man
I also like the idea of having locator maps but I'm with Ram-Man in stating these images should be small (ala the California counties) and placed in the correct places. Since some people are doing great work on adding adjacent county and highway lists to the geography sections of county articles, I vote to have the locator maps placed in the vast white areas to the right of these lists. Before anybody does anything though, please check out m:Wikipediatlas. IMO those maps are the best in terms of look and utility. -- mav
Unfortunately, I fear the non-commerical use clause doesn't have compatibility with the FDL. -- Ellmist Monday, November 11th, 2002
I've been working around the edges, adding or editing a few place articles. As a result I've got one recommendation and some comments:
Discussion moved from Wikipedia:Village pump by Wapcaplet 14:10 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Dunno if anyone has suggested this before; when browsing random articles, I often come across some of the many U.S. cities and counties imported by Rambot. It would be quite cool, I think, to have a small state map that indicates whereabout these cities and counties are (a dot for cities, a highlighted outline for counties, sort of like we already have for U.S. state articles). Is there a public-domain or GPL source for maps like this? If not, I don't imagine it'd be too hard for a dedicated soul to create them (just time-consuming). -- Wapcaplet 23:32 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I did find a collection of public-domain U.S. maps, including nice large county maps like this one of Ohio. They would take quite a bit of editing to reduce to an appropriate format for what I'm thinking of, but could be quite nice! If anybody knows of another public source for similar maps, let me know. I'd be interested in working on these. -- Wapcaplet 23:37 4 Jul 2003 (UTC)
It looks like there are several different practices in use. I don't know if there are any "standards", necessarily.
Of these, red on white seems to be the most common, however. Blue-on-blue looks nice but is kind of at odds with the custom of using blue for water in maps (not to mention it may be hard for some people to distinguish between shades of blue). I do think the state border should somehow be thicker, or darker, than the county borders (thicker would probably suffice, since the county borders would get pretty light at smaller sizes anyway). The only con I can see with using white for the rest of the state is that it may be hard to distinguish the state from the surrounding area at smaller sizes (especially on coastal states with small islands). This is probably not much of an issue, though, since we're just trying to show where the county is.
On balance, I'd have to agree that red on white is probably the way to go. Size is another important issue. Most states are likely to look okay at around 300 pixels wide, at most. Even [ Texas] isn't too bad at this size. However, some counties are very small, and would practically vanish at this size. Storey County, Nevada is the smallest one I can think of, but there may be tinier ones. A big state with some small counties might have troubles at this resolution. We can just make all our maps large, say, 600 pixels to be safe, and use an automated tool to resize them all. If some get too small, we can make those a bit larger. 200 pixels might be enough; we'll see how it goes. Maybe we should try a couple at that size, to see how they turn out (and whether we need to make the state border thicker or whatnot). -- Wapcaplet 14:10 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Looking good! I will gladly pitch in. For now, I will start on California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, and (gulp) Alaska. I've just looked at the outline map of Alaska; many tiny counties with lots of coastline, which are quite hard to distinguish. I don't know how easy these will be to clean up, but I will give it a shot; Alaska is likely to be one of the hardest. -- Wapcaplet 17:40 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I'll email smaller-sized versions to you (since the RGB PNG files are around 60+K each). Also, I've adapted a small script (called shrink
to resize them, if you would like to use something similar:
#!/bin/bash for file in $2; do convert -size $1 "$file" -resize $1 -colors 256 "small/$file" done
Usage:
./shrink [size] "[file(s)]" ./shrink 200 "*.png"
I'm an extreme newbie at shell scripting, so you may be able to do better if you have experience with it. Anyhow, I will e-mail you a chunk of them in a day or two. I've so far finished Alaska, California, Oregon, and Washington (with Nevada soon to come). After that I'll start working my way eastward.
We should come up with a naming convention for these, too. Existing ones are like this:
Which may be a bit too long. I'm thinking something along the lines of California_San_Luis_Obispo_County.png
or even CA_San_Luis_Obispo_County.png
. What do you think?
-- Wapcaplet 23:11 5 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Crap. I am noticing that setting the width at a consistent 300 pixels tends to cause some size differences in terms of height. We probably should have agreed on a maximum width and height, since the tall skinny states (like Illinois, Vermont, etc.) end up looking huge at 300 pixels wide. I just compared all of the states I've done, and most are okay... Illinois and Indiana should probably be padded with whitespace on the left and right prior to resizing, so the height doesn't get out of control. -- Wapcaplet 16:20 12 Jul 2003 (UTC)
I've made some modified versions (using whitespace padding, so they stay at 300 pixels). To me, the following disparity is jarring (county is arbitrary):
File:TX County large.png File:IL County large.png
The above is what happens if we set a fixed width of 300 pixels, and let height vary accordingly. If we constrain them all to less than 300 pixels in height, also, it seems to keep the proportions a little better (and also keeps the file size under control). Here's the resized Illinois, which to me looks better:
Let me know what you think. -- Wapcaplet 02:48 13 Jul 2003 (UTC)
That is certainly true... the padding is something of a hack, but it won't be as visible on the resulting pages. Let me try a couple of mock-ups (see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject U.S. Counties/mockups.)
By James F.
By Wapcaplet
Any chance of a link here from the image description page of all the images? Martin 12:27, 16 Sep 2003 (UTC)