[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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