[Openstreetmap] Linking in Wikipedia

Lars Aronsson lars at aronsson.se
Tue Jul 19 19:54:26 BST 2005


Nick Whitelegg wrote:

> Still think that supplying articles as XML would be very elegant 
> from a "web service" point of view, allowing other websites and 
> client apps to display and search Wikipedia information. Isn't 
> this what the whole excitement around Web Services revolved 
> around?

Possibly.  But Wikipedia isn't revolving around web services, but 
around open content.  The content is open.  You can download it, 
reformat it, and redistribute it in XML or any format you wish, 
provided you follow the GFDL license.  If your wanted format 
requires Wikipedia to change its rules, e.g. by adding metadata in 
a standardized way, I guess the Wikipedia community would be 
interested in hearing your needs and suggestions.

Projects such as IMDb.com input data in a highly structured 
format, where person P is an actor in movie M, which was directed 
by person D, and first showed in year Y.  Wikipedia on the other 
hand only uses one big text window with plain text marked with 
occasional tags.  Extracting structured information after the fact 
can be hard.  If you find geo coordinates in an article, you can 
conclude that this article describes a place and not a person or 
an abstract concept, but right now you cannot know if that place 
is a town, a building, or a county.  The German "Personendaten" 
metadata is a compromise, creating a structured format template 
within the plain text.  We could argue that a {{placename}} 
template should be introduced in Wikipedia, but which attributes 
should it have?  Lat-long, yes.  Perhaps also type (town, country, 
landmark building, mountain peak, etc.) and population.  But 
should it also have an attribute for the year when the town was 
founded?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se




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