[Foundation-l] Fwd: Wikipedia christmas calendar?

[Magnus Manske]

On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 4:54 PM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/11/2 Magnus Manske <magnusmanske at googlemail.com>:
>> On Sat, Oct 31, 2009 at 5:09 PM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
>>> Olli wrote:
>>>> Date: 2009/10/31
>>>> Subject: Wikipedia christmas calendar?
>>>>
>>>> What about a wikipedia christmas calendar? It can maybe preview some
>>>> articles or something similar. Then it can be multilingual.
>>>>
>>>>
>>> Not necessarily just Christmas, but a published calendar for the whole
>>> year.  Wikipedia's date articles are already full of weitd and wonderful
>>> things that happened on this day in history.
>>
>> Or, have a new calender generated automatically on each page reload:
>>
>> http://toolserver.org/~magnus/wikilendar.php?month=11&year=2009
>>
>> (takes a few seconds to parse all these pages and check for suitable images)
>
> I think a human selected calendar would be better for actually
> publishing, but that's certainly a fun script. Can you add an option
> to choose a category so we can have a calendar of Britons, or French,
> or mathematicians, or military people, etc.?

I could limit the articles used to a ceratin category, but IMHO that
would restrict the search too much, that is, either no or a few
possible candidates per day.

> One bug: I got a graph of Imran Khan's bowling statistics rather than
> his portrait...

And if you give me code to identify a person's image, I'll be happy to
implement it, as would the NSA. As it stands, I chose a random article
from e.g. [[November 2]], then chose a random picture from that.

Cheers,
Magnus