[Wikipedia-l] CIA World Factbook

Thu Nov 8 07:51:33 UTC 2001

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 Already several entries are out of date.

Now, we have added CIA world factbook 2000 edition,
but there will be new editions in the future -- how
are we going to integrate the new information into
Wikipedia? Doing it manually would be so time
consuming, but just replacing the pre-existing content
might loose valuable information or changes from other
sources...

I think that simple lists of facts for various
countries, like that contained in the CIA world
factbook, really isn't best suited to Wiki format. And
the CIA world factbook entries, although they have
been reformatted to some extent, really need a lot
more work done for them.

I was thinking maybe if we could create a parrallel
database to Wikipedia, just for countries of the
world, and other such information the CIA World
Factbook records. And we write a script to
automatically convert the CIA world factbook into the
database; and a script to turn the database into
Wikipedia-style format. We could then either link to
these Wikipedia-style pages from the database script,
or import their content into Wikipedia... so long as
we ask people only to change the original database.

We would still maintain Wikipedia articles for more
prosaic bits of information on each country, like its
history... only simple facts like "area", "who is its
President", etc., would be recorded. We would make
sure the database and the Wikipedia articles are
well-integrated.

I also think that several other bits of information
included in Wikipedia really could go in a database as
well. I am thinking here especially of such lists as
[[Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom]]. These lists
can be automatically updated to some extent from each
succesive release of the CIA world factbook.

And people's biographies we be another good candidate:
a database with peoples names, dates/locations of
birth and death, and a few other easily categorised
bits of information (nationality,
occupation/field/activities for which they are
principally remembered). Of course most of the details
on the person would be maintained in the associated
Wikipedia articles, but then we could easily
automatically generate listings like [[Poets]] or
[[Famous personages of 17th century Poland]].

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)...

Simon J Kissane

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