[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia as a gazetteer

Fri Jul 21 06:10:34 UTC 2006

Hello,

I'm doing some work at the moment, informally using the English
Wikipedia to help me identify and disambiguate toponyms (placenames).
Unsurprisingly, it's bloody brilliant. Much better coverage than the
"actual" gazetteer I'm using ( [[Getty Thesaurus of Geographic
Names]]). (Although Getty has canals aplenty, it doesn't seem to have
too many streets.) Unfortunately the use of geographic co-ordinates is
too spotty to only rely on Wikipedia. I wonder if we could find a
suitable gazetteer, whether it might not be worth getting a bot to
import those co-ordinates, if that's even possible...

Working with co-ordinates has made me wonder about their use. It seems
a bit bizarre to represent a huge country (or ocean, river, etc) with
one random dot. Is there any neat, standardised way to refer to
geographic areas? I can't think of one...any ideas?

cheers
Brianna
en.wp:User:pfctdayelise