[Openstreetmap] Linking in Wikipedia

[Nick Whitelegg]

Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se>@vr.ucl.ac.uk on 19/07/2005 14:23:10

Sent by:    openstreetmap-bounces at vr.ucl.ac.uk


To:    openstreetmap at vr.ucl.ac.uk
cc:
Subject:    Re: [Openstreetmap] Linking in Wikipedia



>Here "Geburtsdatum" means "birthdate", "Sterbeort" means "place of
>death", etc.

>This template text (within {{ and }}) can easily be extracted from
>the raw wiki text and processed into a database table.

Is it possible to obtain the "source code" of a Wikipedia page? Some
wikipedia index pages have "view source" but not other pages. If so, then
presumably what one could do is request the "source" of a page from
Wikipedia then use the source to format it into your own site.

>The English Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin
>contains the geographic coordinates of that city in a template
>format {{coor dm|52|31|N|13|24|E|}} but the corresponding article
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London doesn't.  However, I assume
>you wanted something more than just the geo coordinates, more like
>the German Personendaten approach?

What would be good is something along the lines of:

- User visits http://www.free-map.org.uk/
- User clicks on a place name, e.g. Fernhurst
- A request is made to Wikipedia for the Wikipedia article on Fernhurst
- Wikipedia sends back the Fernhurst article in XML which can be processed
by the client.
- The XML might be something like:

<wikipedia_article>
<title>Fernhurst</title>
<description>
Fernhurst is a medium sized village in West Sussex. Originally developing
around the Village Green, the centre of the village is not quarter of a
mile west on the main road. etc etc etc

</description>
<references>
..... links to other relevant articles ...
</references>
</wikipedia_article>

This would be a lot easier to process than a complete HTML page.

Nick