I have been thinking about how we have included the CIA world factbook in Wikipedia. A lot of the information given therein (who is President of such and such a country, etc.) is subject to very frequent change. Already several entries are out of date.
Now, we have added CIA world factbook 2000 edition, but there will be new editions in the future -- how are we going to integrate the new information into Wikipedia? Doing it manually would be so time consuming, but just replacing the pre-existing content might loose valuable information or changes from other sources...
I think that simple lists of facts for various countries, like that contained in the CIA world factbook, really isn't best suited to Wiki format. And the CIA world factbook entries, although they have been reformatted to some extent, really need a lot more work done for them.
I was thinking maybe if we could create a parrallel database to Wikipedia, just for countries of the world, and other such information the CIA World Factbook records. And we write a script to automatically convert the CIA world factbook into the database; and a script to turn the database into Wikipedia-style format. We could then either link to these Wikipedia-style pages from the database script, or import their content into Wikipedia... so long as we ask people only to change the original database.
We would still maintain Wikipedia articles for more prosaic bits of information on each country, like its history... only simple facts like "area", "who is its President", etc., would be recorded. We would make sure the database and the Wikipedia articles are well-integrated.
I also think that several other bits of information included in Wikipedia really could go in a database as well. I am thinking here especially of such lists as [[Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom]]. These lists can be automatically updated to some extent from each succesive release of the CIA world factbook.
And people's biographies we be another good candidate: a database with peoples names, dates/locations of birth and death, and a few other easily categorised bits of information (nationality, occupation/field/activities for which they are principally remembered). Of course most of the details on the person would be maintained in the associated Wikipedia articles, but then we could easily automatically generate listings like [[Poets]] or [[Famous personages of 17th century Poland]].
I might try doing some work on such a database when I finish my end-of-year exams (last exam is on Nov. 27). I am also hoping to have a fiddle with Magnus' PHP Wiki, maybe add some features I've had in mind (e.g. the "#PARENT" command I proposed, improve the search engine, add some (inoffensive) support for builtin category schemes)...
Simon J Kissane
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