[Wikipedia-l] CIA World Factbook

Sun Nov 18 23:26:51 UTC 2001

Reviving old topic...

On Fri, 9 Nov 2001, Michel Clasquin clasqm at 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