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The web interface for inserting the coordinates does not allow to specify planetographic coordinates, increasing to the West.
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Description

There are some celestial bodies that use planetographic coordinates (http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/TargetCoordinates), increasing to the West, and currently Wikidata does not support this system.

Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adlinda_(crater)

It has coordinates (source: http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/Feature/54):

  • 48.5 South
  • 35.6 West

Now in Wikidata coordinates are (http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q2577126):

  • -48.5
  • 35.6
  • globe: callisto

However, the web interface shows:

  • 48°30'0.000"S, 35°36'0.000"E (East instead of West)

because Wikidata does not manage planetographic coordinates.

Sometimes instead in Wikidata celestial bodies with planetographic coordinates (according to the source) use planetocentric coordinates, example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asgard_%28crater%29 => 32.2° North, 139.9° West according the source: http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/Feature/420 => but 32.2, -139.9° in Wikidata (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q724438).

In this way there is a great confusion among Wikidata items, and among Wikidata and the source. Coordinates are inusable for celestial bodies different from the Earth.

It is therefore necessary:

  • the web interface should allow you to specify the coordinate system (planetocentric or planetographic)
  • or if this is not possible, it should be clarified which is the one and only coordinate system for all celestial bodies.

Event Timeline

I'm not sure how the first example ended up saying east, it was apparently imported from itwiki which had (and still has) -48.5, -35.6 in the page source.

We still don't have a way to set the globe via the web interface, so I think we're unlikely to get a way to specify the coordinate system in the web interface any time soon.

There are many examples like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adlinda_(crater), imported from various wikis.
For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hals_(crater), imported from enwiki.

The globe seams correctely set, probably from property P376 :

= mw.dumpObject( mw.wikibase.getEntity( 'Q3696638' ).claims.P625[1].mainsnak )
table#1 {
  ["datatype"] = "globe-coordinate",
  ["datavalue"] = table#2 {
    ["type"] = "globecoordinate",
    ["value"] = table#3 {
      ["globe"] = "http://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q308",
      ["latitude"] = -54.8,
      ["longitude"] = 115,
      ["precision"] = 0.01558405486508,
    },
  },
  ["property"] = "P625",
  ["snaktype"] = "value",
}

But a way to indicate the default coordinate system of Mercury, Io, Ganymede... is west positive is missing. This may be a property of the globe item rather than a property of the coordinates, on each geographical item.