Reviving old topic...
On Fri, 9 Nov 2001, Michel Clasquin clasqm@mweb.co.za XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX wrote:
the [[/Government]] pages are the only ones that obsolesce quickly. The rest (People, Communications, Military, Transportation, Economy, History)--barring catastrophes or other newsworthy events that people would really think of adding anyway--are fairly static. Maybe we could just come up with a script to update the Government each year?
But I spent quite some time wikifying [[South Africa/Government]] and if some damn script comes and wipes that out, I'll start an edit war with it!
<g>
Perhaps each country could have two sections - one for the latest raw CIA data and another properly mantained by wikipedians. Of course, then we might as well use an external link straight to the CIA site for the first one.
I think just linking to the CIA page from each country page makes the most sense. If someone want to make a page about the South African government they can refer to or copy in stuff from the CIA page if they wish. But I do not believe that it does anyone much of any good to simply copy the CIA pages into Wikipedia.
Some of the pages are not even in a paragraphs (like http://www.wikipedia.com/wiki/United_States_of_America/Communications).
The idea of giving Wikipedia some database capablities is a good (if not high priority) one, but the CIA does not need another mirror.
Ian Monroe [[Eean]] http://mlug.missouri.edu/~eean