It should also support cellestial coordinates, see: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Contact_the_development_team/Archive/2013/09#Celestial_coordinate_system

• Bug 51373 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

paperoastro wrote:

A suggestion for adding a "celestial sphere" globe for celestial coordinate system. Celestial coordinates usually used are equatorial coordinate system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equatorial_coordinate_system) and needs "right ascension" (longitude expressed in hours, where 1h = 15 degrees), "declination" (latitude) and an epoch.

With setting this globe, the mask will ask "right ascension" and "declination" instead of latitude and longitude and will not ask altitude; "right ascension" (longitude) will be expressed in hours instead degrees. The epoch will be a qualifier.

T127950 has been created for celestial coordinate support (which needs more than just changing the globe).

Is this likely to be fixed any time soon? I've noticed some people have been adding coordinates for non-Earth objects despite not being able to change the globe. I've been reluctant to do that, but looking at the age of this ticket, I'm thinking it might be more productive to add them without changing the globe and convince someone to run a bot to fix them (using the https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P376 statements).

Oh, and here's a query for items where the coordinate globe doesn't match the P376 statement.

I think we need to have a look into this, since query like this:

SELECT ?item ?place WHERE {
  ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q55818 .
  ?item wdt:P625 ?place .
}

Produces very weird results since half of the places have right globe and other half doesn't.

I also think having a bot fix at least those with P376 contradicting the coordinate is a good idea.

I've added a bot request here: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Bot_requests#Fix_globes_for_non-Earth_coordinates

I think someone might have already fixed some of them (the number seems a lot lower than I remember), but I'm not sure who.

That would be me :) See https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:LocatorBot

Oh, cool :) Would it be possible to run it daily?

There's a few that haven't been fixed, it seems their globes aren't in the supported list?

Since it uses pywikibot, it is limited by what pywikibot's set of globes, which currently seems to have some missing. I'll submit a patch to update it.

See also this property proposal:

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Property_proposal/Coordinate_reference_system

@Lydia_Pintscher Looking through this after our discussion today, @bzimport's comment above about the needs for astronomy looks good. RA, dec and epoch, e.g. see the values in the infobox at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A . Support for other astronomical coordinate systems (such as Galactic coordinates) would also be good, but that can be done later (and possibly by auto-converting them) - for now, just supporting equatorial coordinates would be incredibly useful for the work I'm doing with astronomical infoboxes.

7 years and this is still an annoying issue.

This is still very much a desired function. Is there a technical reason why this can't be implemented?

Well, I agree this is « desired » but this is complicated and not only technical.

First it is only useful for a small number of people (mostly astronomers), for most people is could actually be confusing/annoying to allow to select a globe (and may result in a big number of errors). That's not an excuse but it explains why this is not a priority.
And worse, within this small community of astronomers, there is some disagreement on how to deal with globes (see the links above and the lengthy talks on wiki). This should be solved explicitely before any technical work.

In T56097#2259604, @Nikki wrote:

I've added a bot request here: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Bot_requests#Fix_globes_for_non-Earth_coordinates

Now archived at:

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Bot_requests/Archive/2016/05#Fix_globes_for_non-Earth_coordinates

In T56097#7364223, @VIGNERON wrote:

First it is only useful for a small number of people (mostly astronomers), for most people is could actually be confusing/annoying to allow to select a globe (and may result in a big number of errors).

And yet we already have the capacity to store such values:

https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q108321519&diff=prev&oldid=1489663422

And worse, within this small community of astronomers, there is some disagreement on how to deal with globes (see the links above and the lengthy talks on wiki).

I found none; please be more explicit

This should be solved explicitely before any technical work.

And yet we already have the capacity to store such values...

In case it's of use to anyone, I use a small pywikibot script to set the globe when I need to, it's at https://bitbucket.org/mikepeel/wikicode/src/master/astrocoords.py

(I won't say more since I guess I'm in that small group of astronomers. ;-) Although I also haven't seen any disagreement...)

I found none; please be more explicit

Eg. https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:WikiProject_Astronomy#coordinate_locations_other_than_Earth for a recent discussion
and all the discussions that lead to https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Property_proposal/lunar_coordinates for the "diagreement" (mainly https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Property_proposal/planetary_coordinates ? IIRC there was others ; diagreement is maybe a strong word but at least, it's seems that there is no clear consensus on how to deal with coordinates exactly).

@Pigsonthewing : Not sure why you talk about the storage, yes we can and do store. And yes, there is many ways to edit the globe, many bot and scripts. The question is not about storage but about editing in the UI.

And yes, I'm in the small group of astronomers (not really active there but still) and I would love this functionnality but there is also a lot of other basic functionnalities I would love, some wanted by more people.

This task was discussed in the Bug Triage Hour at the Wikidata Data Quality Days 2022.

It certainly would be good to get this fixed. However, I think this points up a fundamental problem with some of the more complex data structures supported by Wikidata (quantity ranges are a similar case, and probably some of the lexeme structures as well). Namely - this COULD have been implemented as just a qualifier on coordinate location (P625) - either using P376 or something more directly appropriate. But instead it was implemented as an internal structure within Wikidata that requires direct coding within Wikibase to properly support it, and still after many many years is not supported in the Wikidata UI. I think a better longer-term solution here is to plan to sunset these more complex data structures that could simply be handled with properties/qualifiers. One way or another this NEEDS to be fixed though!