Automatic or Manually Assisted: Supervised automatic (with additional safeguards - see below)
Programming Language(s): VB .NET using the DotNetWikiBot classes
Function Summary: To insert stub articles for all remaining villages and towns in the world without exisiting articles - essentially to stop User:Blofeld of SPECTRE and others having to do it manually.
Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): Limited to a certain number of countries per day (which will be selected manually by operator) to run at any time deemed suitable. Lifetime of the bot limited by finite number of countries requiring indexing
Already has a bot flag (Y/N): N
Function Details: The bot will use a website www.maplandia.com to index the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/index.html files that I have downloaded to my own computer. The bot will then create a subpage of Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/Places/COUNTRYNAME where COUNTRYNAME is the country that has been processed. It will list the places in a comma-delimited format:
[[English name(article title)]],original name,district name, latitude, longitude
Because the list will feature many repetitions of district a simple Find/Replace will allow adjustments to make sure the districts are properly wikilinked to existing articles. Once the directory has been created and the list has been checked at the various pages of Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/Places, the operator will run a second piece of code to translate the list into a stub article, which will have the form of User:Fritzpoll/GeoBot/Example as used by Blofeld and others in their existing work. The bot is thus only able to create articles from complete, checked and sourced data as checked by other editors through a two-step verification process.
I am happy, if deemed necessary, to manually confirm any actions the bot takes, and naturally am able to restrict the bot for any trial BAG may wish me to run.
I would strongly support such a proposal. Now we caan start to concentrate on expanding and notr creating such articles. This would be a massive operatiopn and I would not be suprised if the number of artuicles excedes 3 million within a month of bot approval. I'm an Editor of the wiki[[[Wikipedia:Editor review/Editorofthewiki|citation needed]]] 21:14, 19 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Naturally I would strongly support this bot also given that is it extracting coordinates from National Geospatial Intelligence Agency which is as great a site for obtaining names and coordinates as any but using maplandia district organization for guidance. Maplandia cannot claim copywright as technically there is no "copying" being done from their website as the places names are taken from google maps, and anyway the names and coordinates are clearly public domain. Based on the NGIA coordinates and names it is clear this is valid. If this is approved it will be one of the most important developments in wikipedia's history if we can get an article set up for every world location. It would strengthen this encyclopedia very powerfully, particularly if most of the articles can be xpanded and developed from nationla government sources at a later date. In all honesty this should have been considered five years ago. The way Fritz has proposed this is top class I have to say, dare I say it "genius"? ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 21:31, 19 May 2008 (UTC). reply
Endorsement by Keeper I'm a bit of a fish outta water here, being completely technologically dumb, and Bot/Bag inexperienced, but from what I can read from Blofeld, one of our most prolific article creators, and from what I can tell from the hard work of Fritzpoll, this appears to be one of the more astounding and important bot requests I've ever seen. Why? Because it expands Wikipedia into a comprehensive, geographical encyclopedia. It is a bot request for the benefit of our readers, and not just for the efficiency of our writers. This is an excellent bot proposal. I have nothing but confidence that this will be an astounding achievement, saving valuable editor's time, and making Wikipedia the go-to place for geographical information, something it should have been long ago. Just my two cents. Keeper | 76 | Disclaimer 21:38, 19 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Support - I am in no way qualified to address the technical issues regarding the bot, so I won't try. I do however think that a bot to perform these functions would be extremely valuable in several ways. One, obviously, it would create articles for all the occupied locations of the world. By so doing, it would also make it easier for individuals writing articles which deal with such locations easier, as they won't have to try to find an approximate location to put in the article if the article on that specific location already exists. And, of course, it would do all that automatically, saving all of us who have tried to do such work by hand the effort of having to individually create every article. It would also alert any WikiProject or other group that has intersst in that area that there is good cause to think that the subject is notable, something that has occasionally been argues in the past. Obviously, it is only a first step in the development of those articles, but an incredibly important first step in any event. John Carter ( talk) 21:46, 19 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Obviously I gave advice on developing this idea and such, so I can't wear my BAG hat here and approve it. I can however say I think its a good idea and would support say a 100 article creation trial if another BAG approved. MBisanz talk 22:21, 19 May 2008 (UTC) reply
About how many articles total need to be created? WODUP 02:52, 21 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Looking at the 100 test pages, I note that there is a page Feyzabad in there, which is currently a redirect to an existing article on what looks to be the same location. So, a few questions: 1. Will you create this page over the redirect, even though it is a valid redirect? 2. In general, will you create the pages at X (location) or at X, Y (location, district)? 3. If the former, what will you do with identical names for different locations? Will only the first be created? (By the way, I support the proposal in general, and am glad that you use a seemingly reliable source and not the dreadful fallingrain.com or something similar) Fram ( talk) 06:58, 21 May 2008 (UTC) reply
{{ BAGAssistanceNeeded}} Trial limit reached, need comment :) Fritzpoll ( talk) 13:59, 21 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Support Although I understand nothing of the technical aspects of the bot, this is definitely a great project I checked several sample pages generated by the bot, asked a few questions, too, in the related talk pages. Looks excellent.-- Dwaipayan ( talk) 19:03, 24 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Sorry for writing without a wiki user - I'm not a regular WP writer. This really looks like very interesting project - the only thing that I noticed is that on your sample page, the encarta-link at the end does not seem to help very much. In the present form, wouldn't it be better to only have the maplandia-links. They seem to work for pointing to the location in question, whereas encarta doesn't even find the sample town that you used, if one searches for Aju manually. Just my 2 cents. 91.37.145.86 ( talk) 14:06, 24 May 2008 (UTC) reply
The MSN Encarta map is one of the best atlases on the web. If wikipedia had an advanced atlas like this then the link wouldn't be needed. The mini wiki atlas doesn't have the same level of detail. What you;d need to do is locate the exact location on the link rather than having the searhc for it ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 14:43, 24 May 2008 (UTC) reply
The bot run created 100 articles this evening. I am awaiting confirmation that they are correct, but my initial examination highlights only one possible mistake in page creation, to do with a missing space in the title. Overall, I think the bot is operating fine and ready to be flagged, but that is of course up to BAG! Fritzpoll ( talk) 20:04, 27 May 2008 (UTC) reply
The trial showed it to be extremely efficient and ready to be done on a mass scale. We now have 100 new articles within a few minutes on real world places which are consistently referenced and have maps and locators. Remarkable, the sooner this approved the sooner the geographical coverage on wikipedia can even up ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 20:26, 27 May 2008 (UTC) reply
I think this is an excellent idea. As it stands, creation of geographic articles has diverted a lot of resources that could potentially be used to firm up other areas of this project, and I think a bot would do a great deal of good work towards eliminating that problem. And as a consequence the encyclopedia can grow at a much faster rate. -- User:AlbertHerring Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla! 20:48, 27 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Could you please hold-off on a larger-run? I have some suggestions to give. I need some more time. Thanks, Ganeshk ( talk) 21:56, 27 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Here is the list:
That's it for now. Thanks, Ganeshk ( talk) 02:19, 28 May 2008 (UTC) reply
First of all, normally I would recategorize by state level, notce the Butrkina Faso etc categories I have restructured in this way. However as there are only 1100 articles and 34 provinces for Afghanistan I thought initially it would be best to have them all in one category and then just add the general province categories. However I think maybe this may be better organized if it is split. Most countries though will be categorized at state level first depending on how many settlements. As for extracting altitude from falling rain. PLEASE DON'T. I used falling rain in the past and many of the altitude figures are unreliable ask most people who have worked on geo settlments. One instance was a town on the coast of Madagascar reading at an altitude of 257m. There are thousands of incorrect data readings on that site. Another instance was where I was adding towns in the mountains of Burma and one said 3500m and the nearest settlement one mile away read as 460 m. The only thing which appears to be reliable is the coordinates and distance between settlements. There is no need to say something is located at something either becuase this is catered for in the infbox and map and two coordinates min atlas icons even 3 as is being suggested in one article is redundant -I often try to remove as many of them from the text as possible as it is untidy. I wouldn't have any objections though to the coordinates in the top right hand corner. As for stub templates this will have to be arranged with User:Alai and the stub sorting group, but in my experience they are often unwilling to create categories in advance
♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦
$1,000,000?
12:04, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
reply
I think this bot is a good idea, but it would really be nice if it would automatically put the class & importance assessments in the wikiproject for the talk pages (see this page for Wikipedia:CITIES assessment descriptions; the class for a newly created article would automatically be stub; WP:CITIES has a population-based assessment (you could read in the population and assign the importance assessment based on that).
Without doing this, the sheer quantity of the articles that you're creating will create a metric buttload's worth of work in the assessments department for various wikiprojects. Dr. Cash ( talk) 15:19, 28 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Yes of course Cash this is what we plan in regards to project tagging, I'm not sure about that population thing though as there doesn't seem anything avialable . ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 16:18, 28 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Hi. Great bot. Could you please not insert a flag into the infoboxes you create. The country name is plenty. Rettetast ( talk) 23:24, 29 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Well its only a matter of preference really, I don't accept the argument that flags affect an articles neutrality and I don't think they are ugly either. But I have no objections if you remove them ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 09:58, 30 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Trial seems good, no problems. Go for it. Approved.
dihydrogen monoxide (
H2O)
11:20, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
reply
Automatic or Manually Assisted: Supervised automatic (with additional safeguards - see below)
Programming Language(s): VB .NET using the DotNetWikiBot classes
Function Summary: To insert stub articles for all remaining villages and towns in the world without exisiting articles - essentially to stop User:Blofeld of SPECTRE and others having to do it manually.
Edit period(s) (e.g. Continuous, daily, one time run): Limited to a certain number of countries per day (which will be selected manually by operator) to run at any time deemed suitable. Lifetime of the bot limited by finite number of countries requiring indexing
Already has a bot flag (Y/N): N
Function Details: The bot will use a website www.maplandia.com to index the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency http://earth-info.nga.mil/gns/html/index.html files that I have downloaded to my own computer. The bot will then create a subpage of Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/Places/COUNTRYNAME where COUNTRYNAME is the country that has been processed. It will list the places in a comma-delimited format:
[[English name(article title)]],original name,district name, latitude, longitude
Because the list will feature many repetitions of district a simple Find/Replace will allow adjustments to make sure the districts are properly wikilinked to existing articles. Once the directory has been created and the list has been checked at the various pages of Wikipedia:WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/Places, the operator will run a second piece of code to translate the list into a stub article, which will have the form of User:Fritzpoll/GeoBot/Example as used by Blofeld and others in their existing work. The bot is thus only able to create articles from complete, checked and sourced data as checked by other editors through a two-step verification process.
I am happy, if deemed necessary, to manually confirm any actions the bot takes, and naturally am able to restrict the bot for any trial BAG may wish me to run.
I would strongly support such a proposal. Now we caan start to concentrate on expanding and notr creating such articles. This would be a massive operatiopn and I would not be suprised if the number of artuicles excedes 3 million within a month of bot approval. I'm an Editor of the wiki[[[Wikipedia:Editor review/Editorofthewiki|citation needed]]] 21:14, 19 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Naturally I would strongly support this bot also given that is it extracting coordinates from National Geospatial Intelligence Agency which is as great a site for obtaining names and coordinates as any but using maplandia district organization for guidance. Maplandia cannot claim copywright as technically there is no "copying" being done from their website as the places names are taken from google maps, and anyway the names and coordinates are clearly public domain. Based on the NGIA coordinates and names it is clear this is valid. If this is approved it will be one of the most important developments in wikipedia's history if we can get an article set up for every world location. It would strengthen this encyclopedia very powerfully, particularly if most of the articles can be xpanded and developed from nationla government sources at a later date. In all honesty this should have been considered five years ago. The way Fritz has proposed this is top class I have to say, dare I say it "genius"? ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 21:31, 19 May 2008 (UTC). reply
Endorsement by Keeper I'm a bit of a fish outta water here, being completely technologically dumb, and Bot/Bag inexperienced, but from what I can read from Blofeld, one of our most prolific article creators, and from what I can tell from the hard work of Fritzpoll, this appears to be one of the more astounding and important bot requests I've ever seen. Why? Because it expands Wikipedia into a comprehensive, geographical encyclopedia. It is a bot request for the benefit of our readers, and not just for the efficiency of our writers. This is an excellent bot proposal. I have nothing but confidence that this will be an astounding achievement, saving valuable editor's time, and making Wikipedia the go-to place for geographical information, something it should have been long ago. Just my two cents. Keeper | 76 | Disclaimer 21:38, 19 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Support - I am in no way qualified to address the technical issues regarding the bot, so I won't try. I do however think that a bot to perform these functions would be extremely valuable in several ways. One, obviously, it would create articles for all the occupied locations of the world. By so doing, it would also make it easier for individuals writing articles which deal with such locations easier, as they won't have to try to find an approximate location to put in the article if the article on that specific location already exists. And, of course, it would do all that automatically, saving all of us who have tried to do such work by hand the effort of having to individually create every article. It would also alert any WikiProject or other group that has intersst in that area that there is good cause to think that the subject is notable, something that has occasionally been argues in the past. Obviously, it is only a first step in the development of those articles, but an incredibly important first step in any event. John Carter ( talk) 21:46, 19 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Obviously I gave advice on developing this idea and such, so I can't wear my BAG hat here and approve it. I can however say I think its a good idea and would support say a 100 article creation trial if another BAG approved. MBisanz talk 22:21, 19 May 2008 (UTC) reply
About how many articles total need to be created? WODUP 02:52, 21 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Looking at the 100 test pages, I note that there is a page Feyzabad in there, which is currently a redirect to an existing article on what looks to be the same location. So, a few questions: 1. Will you create this page over the redirect, even though it is a valid redirect? 2. In general, will you create the pages at X (location) or at X, Y (location, district)? 3. If the former, what will you do with identical names for different locations? Will only the first be created? (By the way, I support the proposal in general, and am glad that you use a seemingly reliable source and not the dreadful fallingrain.com or something similar) Fram ( talk) 06:58, 21 May 2008 (UTC) reply
{{ BAGAssistanceNeeded}} Trial limit reached, need comment :) Fritzpoll ( talk) 13:59, 21 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Support Although I understand nothing of the technical aspects of the bot, this is definitely a great project I checked several sample pages generated by the bot, asked a few questions, too, in the related talk pages. Looks excellent.-- Dwaipayan ( talk) 19:03, 24 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Sorry for writing without a wiki user - I'm not a regular WP writer. This really looks like very interesting project - the only thing that I noticed is that on your sample page, the encarta-link at the end does not seem to help very much. In the present form, wouldn't it be better to only have the maplandia-links. They seem to work for pointing to the location in question, whereas encarta doesn't even find the sample town that you used, if one searches for Aju manually. Just my 2 cents. 91.37.145.86 ( talk) 14:06, 24 May 2008 (UTC) reply
The MSN Encarta map is one of the best atlases on the web. If wikipedia had an advanced atlas like this then the link wouldn't be needed. The mini wiki atlas doesn't have the same level of detail. What you;d need to do is locate the exact location on the link rather than having the searhc for it ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 14:43, 24 May 2008 (UTC) reply
The bot run created 100 articles this evening. I am awaiting confirmation that they are correct, but my initial examination highlights only one possible mistake in page creation, to do with a missing space in the title. Overall, I think the bot is operating fine and ready to be flagged, but that is of course up to BAG! Fritzpoll ( talk) 20:04, 27 May 2008 (UTC) reply
The trial showed it to be extremely efficient and ready to be done on a mass scale. We now have 100 new articles within a few minutes on real world places which are consistently referenced and have maps and locators. Remarkable, the sooner this approved the sooner the geographical coverage on wikipedia can even up ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 20:26, 27 May 2008 (UTC) reply
I think this is an excellent idea. As it stands, creation of geographic articles has diverted a lot of resources that could potentially be used to firm up other areas of this project, and I think a bot would do a great deal of good work towards eliminating that problem. And as a consequence the encyclopedia can grow at a much faster rate. -- User:AlbertHerring Io son l'orecchio e tu la bocca: parla! 20:48, 27 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Could you please hold-off on a larger-run? I have some suggestions to give. I need some more time. Thanks, Ganeshk ( talk) 21:56, 27 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Here is the list:
That's it for now. Thanks, Ganeshk ( talk) 02:19, 28 May 2008 (UTC) reply
First of all, normally I would recategorize by state level, notce the Butrkina Faso etc categories I have restructured in this way. However as there are only 1100 articles and 34 provinces for Afghanistan I thought initially it would be best to have them all in one category and then just add the general province categories. However I think maybe this may be better organized if it is split. Most countries though will be categorized at state level first depending on how many settlements. As for extracting altitude from falling rain. PLEASE DON'T. I used falling rain in the past and many of the altitude figures are unreliable ask most people who have worked on geo settlments. One instance was a town on the coast of Madagascar reading at an altitude of 257m. There are thousands of incorrect data readings on that site. Another instance was where I was adding towns in the mountains of Burma and one said 3500m and the nearest settlement one mile away read as 460 m. The only thing which appears to be reliable is the coordinates and distance between settlements. There is no need to say something is located at something either becuase this is catered for in the infbox and map and two coordinates min atlas icons even 3 as is being suggested in one article is redundant -I often try to remove as many of them from the text as possible as it is untidy. I wouldn't have any objections though to the coordinates in the top right hand corner. As for stub templates this will have to be arranged with User:Alai and the stub sorting group, but in my experience they are often unwilling to create categories in advance
♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦
$1,000,000?
12:04, 28 May 2008 (UTC)
reply
I think this bot is a good idea, but it would really be nice if it would automatically put the class & importance assessments in the wikiproject for the talk pages (see this page for Wikipedia:CITIES assessment descriptions; the class for a newly created article would automatically be stub; WP:CITIES has a population-based assessment (you could read in the population and assign the importance assessment based on that).
Without doing this, the sheer quantity of the articles that you're creating will create a metric buttload's worth of work in the assessments department for various wikiprojects. Dr. Cash ( talk) 15:19, 28 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Yes of course Cash this is what we plan in regards to project tagging, I'm not sure about that population thing though as there doesn't seem anything avialable . ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 16:18, 28 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Hi. Great bot. Could you please not insert a flag into the infoboxes you create. The country name is plenty. Rettetast ( talk) 23:24, 29 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Well its only a matter of preference really, I don't accept the argument that flags affect an articles neutrality and I don't think they are ugly either. But I have no objections if you remove them ♦Blofeld of SPECTRE♦ $1,000,000? 09:58, 30 May 2008 (UTC) reply
Trial seems good, no problems. Go for it. Approved.
dihydrogen monoxide (
H2O)
11:20, 30 May 2008 (UTC)
reply