On 13/09/15 13:18, Gordon Joly wrote:
On 12/09/15 21:19, Lester Caine wrote:
Plan off attack is to make sure all the places locally exist in wikipedia and I sort of got off to a good start, but hit a problem with miss matched names and missing entries. I've modified https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weston_Subedge_railway_station to use the correct name for the period the railway existed, but there was no page for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weston_Sub_Edge which I've created by cribbing other local villages. My crib sheet of names lists 'Weston Subedge' as taken from the ONS list but I'm waiting on some feed back from the Parish Clerk as to the 'official' spelling nowadays.
Will Wikidata help?
It's yet something else to have to worry about? Looks like it needs all of the changes going into OSM and wikipedia then need manually cross referencing in wikidata?
My main problem is that none of the major systems provide an ideal solution to the basic problem of handling genealogical data. On OSM the camp that demands that nothing 'historic' is retained in the main database are trying to push their view, much as some views get pushed in wikipedia (which is why I stopped adding data previously when pages kept being deleted).
Wikipedia has a little of the same 'it must be current' going on, yet the historic material is often buried in the pages themselves, just as the history of the changes to maps is buried in the change log of OSM. And Wikidata is based on a similar restricted view? I can't see a means of time-stamping data such as population data which evolves over time.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Towns_and_villages_in_Worcesters... is yet another area to keep in touch with? But I have at least found some historic material properly dated within that data. I'm planning a run around here with the camera to add some extra images to use on the new pages.
That place names evolve over time is a simple fact, and while normally there is some clean determination on a change, a boundary change for electoral reasons, or the adoption of a new name for so local event, other changes are a little less distinct. However simply redirecting from one name to another, or burying it as an old_name looses the key piece of information as to when the change occurred. If one is working through the early census information tracking a families movement, then the name valid at that time is the one one would like to look up and here we do have many examples of old addresses that have a completely different form today. The ones that currently fall through the gaps are old road names which have been lost through new development or simple renaming. While a renaming may be 'noteworthy' enough to justify a wikipedia page, there is no reliable place to look up the location of these former addresses whoever they come about.
Now if all of the information in the right hand box on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weston_Sub_Edge was populated from the wikidata entry, and the evolution of things like 'population' and other local variable data was also stored in wikidata then I think things would be a lot easier to manage over time? CAN we select data from wikidata as we can now add [[Category:xxx]] tags?