User:Fritzpoll/GeoBot
Missing geo articles
[edit]Hi. If it puts things in perspective at present we have 33 articles on towns in Bangladesh and only 5 or 6 of them are of any real worth. There are over 27,000 missing articles on towns in Bangladesh alone. Its taken 7 years to cover 33/ 27,000 places in one country alone. The starter articles would look like this. Wikipedia cannot possibly hope to achieving the "sum of all knowledge" if 90% of the planet is missing geographically. A bot is the only way we can ever hope to develop dramtically in this field in the next few years. A bot should be running daily for hours on end putting these places onto here by country. All it is is a case of reading a list of places and their region/district and google coordinates. If the geohack works I'm certain something could be done to make this a reality. I for one am willing to dedicate a lot of time towards achieving it. pLease think about doing something. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 18:37, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
- I've had a think about it, and I certainly think I can get something working. I'd just need a bit of help sourcing the data. As you say, it's quite shocking that this is missing, and I'd really like to help out. A bit of help with getting the data, and we'll be dandy. Can you give me the example website - I've forgotten where it was (goes to look after saving page)? Fritzpoll (talk) 21:07, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
Maplandia has the easiest system I have seen. If you browse through some of countries you'll see they are split into the regions and districts and it will astound you how much is missing, but you will also see how simply progrmamed the site is -check out their URL system. I'm certain something could also be retrieved from a google earth directory or something (if Maplandia is not legal to use) as all we need is the names/district/regtions of countries and the coordinates. That data is non copywrightable I am certain. Thereis also [1] a US government directory also I couldn't access this when I tried earlier. There is abound to be a way to read names of places in countries and their global coordinates and generate articles quickly in this way. Its just amatter of finding this and being able to generate thousands of articles with placing the coordinates in the infobox to create the location to start them. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 21:13, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
For instance see Burma which indicates there are some 38,000 places yet we have barely a 1000 on here (and only after weeks of stubbing myself). Scroll down the page and then you click on a first level division e.g Kachin and this in turn is split inot second divisions and then third divisions -the townships. Its just a case of reading the place names listed in these and the coordinates. ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 21:19, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
- Whilst you've been typing, I've looked at their webpage, and think I could probably extract the names automatically. If we run this, to what depth do we need to go? Level one administrative regions, or all the way down to level 3? Have begun knocking together some test code. Carry on discussion at User:Fritzpoll/Geobot - I'm putting this conversation in there now. Fritzpoll (talk) 21:21, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
The first level divisions, even second are just the regions and district names. Most of the time we have these. What we want are the settlements at the third level which are filed in an A-Z. Often they list the places about 20 on each page and you then click the name of the place for the map. I'll find you what I mean now. See http://www.maplandia.com/burma/kachin/waingmaw/ waingmaw]. This is a subdistrict of a region in the country. Scroll down and you'll see it list the complete A-Z of settlements in that sub district but split into sizeable parts. Now click on one of these and then you'll see the settlements listed under each section e,g see settlements Aju-Hkang listed. What we want to extract the entirety of these for all of the subdistricts and places by country and get them onto here ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 21:31, 18 May 2008 (UTC)
♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 21:28, 18 May 2008 (UTC) Of course my goal eventually would be to search on a world map for anywhere in any country of the world and for wikipedia to have a decent article on it. This would be an awesome achievement if we could cover the world completely and evenly and is the very fabric of what wikipedia is about ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 21:28, 18 May 2008 (UTC)