Re: [Wikipedia-l] Commons Database

Please excuse my ignorance if a proposal such as this one has already been discussed already (perhaps it's a wrong mailing list) but I could not find any information about it. Has it ever been discussed, considered to establish a central database (in a manner of Commons) to hold information such as for example basic statistical data about population, area, geographical data etc etc for towns, cities or even countries? If data like that was to be stored in one central location it would be possible to link to it from Wikipedias and it would make it easier to update such data and it would make it consistent across all projects. Just a quick example, according to en Wiki the population of Washington DC is 581,530, German Wiki says it's 548.360, according to French Wiki it's 553 523 and Polish Wiki states it's 582 049. If data like that was stored in a central location, one could just update it once and all projects would show the same information. Also it would make it easy for bots to create articles containing basic demographical data about towns and localities based on such information. Cheers, -- Michal "roo72" Rosa