I'm pretty excited about this, if part of the plan is to encourage Wikipedia contributors to add their data as data instead of as finished output.
I've spent some time lately building election results maps for Google, and while Wikipedia has been a useful resource, it's also been very frustrating.
There is a wealth of geographic data on Wikipedia, but hardly any of it is in a usable form. Look at all the interesting maps you see there. Somebody generated each of those maps from actual usable data such as shapefiles [1] or KML files [2]. The generated maps are nice to look at, but I can't do anything else with them. I need the shapefiles or equivalent to build other kinds of maps with the data.
For the Brazil election, we had shapefiles for the municipalities which had been mangled by a process that converted all the municipality names to uppercase with no accent marks. I wanted to display the correctly capitalized and accented names and found this list:
This was great! It had all the data I needed. But it's in a jumbled format that looks nice in the wiki but doesn't lend itself to machine use. It took me a few hours to write some Python code to parse the page and get it into a CSV format that I could import into my database. This is a frustrating kind of work, because I was pretty sure that somebody had started with nice tabular data and generated the initial version of this Wikipedia page from that.
If we're eventually able to get this kind of data as real usable data, that will save a lot of people a lot of work.
I've spent some time lately building election results maps for Google, and while Wikipedia has been a useful resource, it's also been very frustrating.
There is a wealth of geographic data on Wikipedia, but hardly any of it is in a usable form. Look at all the interesting maps you see there. Somebody generated each of those maps from actual usable data such as shapefiles [1] or KML files [2]. The generated maps are nice to look at, but I can't do anything else with them. I need the shapefiles or equivalent to build other kinds of maps with the data.
For the Brazil election, we had shapefiles for the municipalities which had been mangled by a process that converted all the municipality names to uppercase with no accent marks. I wanted to display the correctly capitalized and accented names and found this list:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_municipalities_of_Brazi...
This was great! It had all the data I needed. But it's in a jumbled format that looks nice in the wiki but doesn't lend itself to machine use. It took me a few hours to write some Python code to parse the page and get it into a CSV format that I could import into my database. This is a frustrating kind of work, because I was pretty sure that somebody had started with nice tabular data and generated the initial version of this Wikipedia page from that.
If we're eventually able to get this kind of data as real usable data, that will save a lot of people a lot of work.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapefile
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyhole_Markup_Language