[WikiEN-l] Re: Bot for generating articles on cities in Israel

Mon Sep 15 20:45:11 UTC 2003

Geoff Burling wrote:
> On Sun, 14 Sep 2003, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
> 
> 
>>--- Adam Raizen <araizen at newmail.net> wrote:
>>
>>>I would like to use a bot to upload articles on
>>>cities in Israel based
>>>on information from Israel's Central Bureau of
>>>Statistics
>>>(http://www.cbs.gov.il), a la Rambot. You can see an
>>>example article at
>>>[[User:AdamRaizen/Ramla]]. Any objections or
>>>comments?
>>>
>>
>>I wouldn't object, but the following part is a bit
>>unclear:
>>
>>The ethnic makeup of the city is 80.5% Jewish and
>>other, and 20.0% Arab (15.4% Muslim and 4.0%
>>Christian). There are 450 new immigrants.
> 
> 
> Are these catagories legally defined in Israeli law? (Or
> at least, the same terms from the Israeli census materials?)
> If so, I would like to see those terms hyperlinked to
> an article explaining the legal definitions, much as
> was done for the U.S. cities.

Kind of. For Jews, the Interior Ministry (whose data is the source of 
the data used here) basically accepts as Jewish whoever the Rabbinate 
says is Jewish (with some complications), and this is a hotly debated 
political issue. I'm not sure of the situation for Muslims and 
Christians, but I assume it's similar (i.e. whatever the local religious 
authority says). There probably should be an article explaining all this 
somewhere anyway.

>>Also, I would like to know how this bot handles it
>>when articles are already there but it wants to put
>>this data there.
>>LDan
>>
> 
> Good point.

Since there aren't many already existing articles, I will just merge 
these in with the previous text manually.

 > I would also add some kind of referent that
> helps a user to locate where in Israel these municipalities
> are. Both the US & France listings include the name of
> the local government, which offer useful information
> for locating the habitation in question.

The local government is the subject of the article, and there aren't any 
other divisions of local government. The article mentions the Interior 
Ministry's District or Region, which will tell you whether the city is a 
suburb of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, or Haifa, or otherwise whether it's in 
the North, South, or Center, or in the West Bank or Gaza Strip. If I 
could find geographic coordinates, I would add a lot more detailed 
information.

A user on he.wikipedia suggested that tables are easier to read than 
paragraphs. Am I correct that this has already been debated with regards 
to Rambot's articles and settled that short paragraphs are okay, at 
least for the English wikipedia?

--Adam Raizen