Editing CS Newsletter for the Netherlands 2010.1 (section)

==CS location-database fixing==

Couchsurfing the Netherlands Geography

Among the different groups of volunteers who contribute to the site improvement, there is a team in charge of fixing and maintaining the Couchsurfing location database. This database contains the list of countries, regions, provinces and cities that you use when you select your location in your profile, when you do a CouchSearch or when you select the eventlocation.

Since last October, the team has started a comprehensive correction of the database for the Netherlands. This process is done province by province. As we write these lines, the provinces Noord-Holland, Zuid-Holland, Utrecht and Flevoland are completed while Noord-Brabant is in progress.

The corrections consists of:
* checking the spelling of places names
* relocating cities into the right province
* merging cities when needed (like Etten and Leur which should be Etten-Leur in Noord Brabant)
* merging wrongly listed districts names with the city they are part of (like Statenkwartier which was merged with The Hague)
* adjusting the cities coordinates (latitude and longitude) from which distances between cities are calculated: this is used when you make a CouchSearch with a x kilometers radius.

All these changes aim to make it easier for surfers and hosts to find each other, as this is the core of Couchsurfing.