Hi everyone,
At
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2011/progress
and
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments/post_mortem
we're talking about structured lists. You might wonder: How do I make
these structured lists? In this post I will try to explain how to do it.
It's actually not that difficult to create :-)
I will take Switzerland as an example. Their system is described at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_Inventory_of_Cultural_Property_of_Nation…
.
We're going to create or convert tables. For this we need to know the
fields to include. Some important fields:
* id - the unique id assigned by the local registry, this is the primary key
* name - name of the object (or a description)
* address - the address of the object
* municipality - the municipality in which the object lies
* lat - the latitude
* lon - the longitude
* image - image of the object
You can of course add more fields and the name of the fields should
probably be in the local language.
The fields I used for the Swiss monuments are:
* image
* name
* address
* municipality
* CH1903_X (they use a strange lat/lon system in Switzerland)
* CH1903_Y
* KGS_nr - this is the unique id
Now we need to make two templates
* A header template which is going to be at the start of each table
* A row template. One row per monument containing all the information.
These templates make the lists look pretty and make it possible for a
bot to harvest the information (more about that at
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Monuments/template_sys…
).
For Switzerland I created
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:SIoCPoNaRS_header and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:SIoCPoNaRS_row .
Now we got the base of the template system. If you don't have any lists
yet you have to get a dataset to start from scratch. If you already have
lists you need to convert them. If you're lucky some bot operator is
able to convert a lot of the lists automagicly with complicated regular
expressions. With the Swiss lists I was able to convert quite a lot with
a bot, see for example
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cultural_property_of_national_signific…
(check the source and history).
The remaining items need to be fixed manually, you should mobilize some
users to help out.
Now you have structured lists! This is where I stand now with the Swiss
project. I will do a follow up most when I got some of the nice tools
working so we can actually make use of these structured lists.
Any questions?
Maarten