[Wikipedia-l] CIA World Factbook

[lsanger at nupedia.com]

On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Simon Kissane wrote:

> 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 Already several entries are out of date.

Yep, how we will maintain changeable information is a sticky problem.

We are limited, though, to the people we have on hand.  Unless we have
enough people willing to code and implement the sort of solution you're
proposing, Simon, we might as well not try.  There are a good half-dozen
people who have put serious time into those factbook entries, but I'm not
sure that's enough for the sort of project you propose.

In a year, though, the factbook info will be even more out of date (hence,
we'll have more motivation) and we might very well have several times the
number of people working on the project that we have now.  We also,
hopefully, will have finalized Magnus' software and several coders will be
intimately familiar with the software and how to add new features.  So,
I'd suggest putting this off until then.

On the other hand, I could simply be entirely wrong about how much
interest there'd be in working on this and keeping this updated.

> 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)...

For reasons others have mentioned, I don't like the #PARENT feature,
personally.

Larry