Friday, August 04, 2006

Geocodes ... or how various Wikipedias can co-operate

There was that mail on the wikipedia list asking about co-operation to insert geocodes to all sorts of articles on the German wikipedia.

I would very much like to help them, but I don't have the time to do so because I am already involved into too many projects besides my family and work. Well, yes, I would work on it if my work helped various projects contemporarily - simply because it would help also those where I am involved in.

How can that be achieved? On one hand by adding structured data to all these pages and then create a table with codes and have the bot do the work to insert all codes (the same could then be used also for other things).

And then there is an even better way: Wikidata

How does that work? It is quite easy: Wikidata is the engine of WiktionaryZ and therefore already tested when it comes to handle translations and definitions. All the data used for a city can be inserted in a table and that record can than be translated into whatever language we prefer. The inserted data like geocodes, numbers etc. is immediately available for all projects. Then there is only the localisation work for the descriptions to be done. Should there be an error in the statistical data, the geocodes etc. and someone corrects it: the error is immediately corrected anywhere. This means that work becomes much less and we can co-operate in a more efficient way.

The resulting data would appear inbound in the wikipedia articles (in any language) - and that would help us a lot.

Well, this is definitely a project I would work for ... since I would work for my projects + help the others have correct data.

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