User:Streetmathematician/The Mexican Grid

When looking at maps of wikidata coordinates, such as the excellent map provided by User:Addshore, there's an apparent "square grid" for locations in Mexico, particularly rural Mexico.

Closer examination reveals that in these areas, there are significantly more locations with degree values whose first post-decimal-point digit is [012345], as opposed to [6789]. That hints at a possibility, which is that 20°40′ was mistakenly transformed to 20.40° rather than 20.666667°.

Luckily, for all the points that appear to be affected, a good source is available: the INEGI database from Mexico. Finding some likely-wrong locations and comparing them appears to confirm our theory.

The next step was to get INEGI data for all the points, which took a while but was essentially boring, then automatically identifying those points which:

have an INEGI location ID
have coordinates which closely match the "incorrect" reading of the INEGI coordinates
do not have other coordinates or unexpected sources for their coordinates
have not been modified recently
have a label

These are:

The next step will be to fix those and watch them to see whether there's any negative fallout, then extend the same procedure (minus, probably, the watching) to the (significantly larger number of) points which do not currently have a label.

Locations with multiple coordinate pairs, one of which is incorrect:

User:Streetmathematician/The Mexican Grid

Navigation menu

Search