![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 |
This project seems to be dealing with "oodles of data" located all over the show and a central hosting location seems necessary. I don't know of any resources provided by wikimedia and suspect because all of the participants are in South Africa it makes more sense to use a service in South Africa. Does anybody have a server (or decent access to one) lying around that can be used to do the trick? -I can possibly arrange for something but if somebody has a better option or idea ... Paul Hjul 16:57, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
[User:htonl|htonl] has already created a script to automatically generate maps. (Though with user mediation). I propose to create a bot to add census data to municipality pages (possibly with some human mediation). I also propose to use a bot to generate the pages initially: Most of the municipality pages don't exist yet, and there are more than I would want to process through by hand. What we could end up with is a single bot for maintaining South African municipality pages.
Anyway, just a thought (caffeine kicking in). I'm willing to put some time into this. (I think I'd prefer to use Python, rather than Perl - though the two can be integrated). - Kieran 20:50, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
Htonl: I've been speaking to a guy at Stats SA. They're sending me a CD of GIS data, which sounds like it has everything from municipal boundaries right down to wards, with towns and cities added (even where those don't coincide with municipalities). I'm not sure what format it's in, but I'll burn you a copy, if you like. We could probably arrange to meet up somewhere, since I'm also based in Cape Town.
Also, they've sent me an Excel spreadsheet of various data (by pre-2005 boundaries, but there's some other data for converting it to the current ones), so I'll get to work on a Python script to generate text from that in the next week or so. We should probably create a mock-up page, maybe in the project namespace, of how we want the generated pages to look. - Kieran 14:51, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
I've been pondering taking the data send in a spreedsheet and putting it into an SQL datatable seems like a sensible possition. My idea on what the table will need to contain the following fields:
Official Name of Municipality I think its important to stick to official names
Municipal ID
Constituent Part of (Either be a Province Name (in the instance of a District or Metropolitan or the District)
System of Governance For this I believe a direct reference to the section of the Local Government: Municipal Systems Actthat describes the system in play.
Co-ordinates Nice little Geographic Co-ordinate probably should be taken according the middle of the municipality.
Size In terms of land area of the municipality. Large lakes and rivers could pose a problem.
Mayor Just a name and political party
Principal Settlements With the first named settlement being the "seat"
Population According to census
Description Fluffy text block
Using the ID as given by the Demarcation board also allows us to establish coatX.jpg files (where X is the id)
Thoughts? Paul Hjul 09:44, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
We need to decide on a naming convention for all the municipality articles. At the moment, all the Western Cape articles - a complete set - are of the format "XYZ District Municipality, Western Cape" (for districts) or "XYZ Municipality, Western Cape" (for locals). (CoCT is at City of Cape Town.) There are Gauteng articles of the format "XYZ District Municipality", and some Eastern Cape articles of the format "XYZ Municipality, Eastern Cape".
- htonl 18:48, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
On the notion of keeping Metropolitan Municipalities kept as a special case mostly because they are administratively a "different animal altogether" from the District and Local Municipality scene. One problem though is that the provincial link is a problem. As for naming them city XYZ hell no. Two reasons firstly in many cases the municipality and traditional city area do not correspond JHB and Cape Town and secondly several municipalities are X City Municipality (Buffalo City and Mogale City come to mind).
Im not sure that you are right about the City of ... as the official name. In fact IIRC: Cape Town - Cape Town Unicity; Johannesburg - City of Johannesburg or Joburg Metropol (I've seen official letterheads professing such name) Pretoria - Tswane Metropolitan Council; the fight being whether or not an entity of the City of Tswane exists. Also if we work from the premise that each Municipality should have its own Wikipedia page there is no reason why City of Johannesburg should not refer to the entry on Johannesburg (as opposed to Randburg) whilst Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality refers to the wiki page on that juristic entity (the Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality page will be the long article for government with respect to City of Johannesburg). Alternatively there can be the article Johannesburg and Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality and City of Johannesburg shall be a disambiguation page. Essentially the current layout doesn't tell a person what province the Metropols are in. Putting the List of municipalities into tables might help Paul Hjul 09:38, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
Does a person simply add their name to the membership list. I did a bit of work on this last year but circumstances cut down my internet usage and Im now back with a vengence. In terms of wiki editing I am still a rookie to boot. Please help
Are there any templates available for us to work from or should we draw up a list of what should be in the pages. Also doesn't the Dept of Prov and Local Government keep a lot of the needed info (mayors etc ...) in a database?
Uber. I now its a case of translating and looking into a freeking database Paul Hjul 18:05, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
I can probably "host" the data in MySQL datatables with RUCUS if that will help. We'll then need to do the conversions although I suspect that once its in MySQL tables available on the net it will be quicker for people to build bots to generate files Paul Hjul 12:59, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
I've translated Tintazul's template. It's now available at Template:Zamuni. As a test case, I've applied it to Cape Agulhas Local Municipality. - Kieran 18:43, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
I've finished doing my very small bit: coalescing all the habitations, races, and languages data into a single file. (It took a bit of perl - yay! I'm a geek!) The first three lines of the resulting CSV look like this:
You see the fields are separated by ;. I've highlighted here the first line which is the header. The fields shouldn't be too hard to figure out. I've already added all the totals from the races fields into the population field. The field codemuni is the original field from the Stats SA tables, so I left it there in case we need to link to any more data from them. The row order hasn't been changed, either. The fields area; president; party; neighbours; website are empty as I don't know where to fetch that data. neighbours will probably require typing. One of us could do that, the other could check out the result.
I did not understand too well what Kieran said about "charts of the more obscure data (ie: language, energy source, etc)" -- you're probably referring to info I wasn't intending to put on the final document. I love the idea of an automated insert with PyWikiBot (not that I've ever used it.)
I'm done working with the data I have. We need to do some coding to derive actual template fields from data on the table, for instance creating a string of languages greatest percentage first, from the twelve language fields. If you want my CSV just let me know. Cheers. -- Tintazul msg 22:55, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_South_Africa
Over and above the problems with this page (which Im trying to get a discussion on in its page) I think it has some relevance to this project particularly because there isn't a "South African Settlement Project" to my knowledge. The list also has some interesting resources. Paul Hjul 16:57, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 15:04, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 20:02, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
I think this should be merged w/ the South Africa wikiproject. icelandic hur ric ane #12 (talk) 00:50, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
For the purposes of centralized discussion, please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject South Africa#Proposed merger with Wikipedia:WikiProject South African municipalities. Thank you. John Carter ( talk) 17:07, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
G'day everyone! I wonder what we would consider the most accurate or most reliable information on municipalities. The demarcation web site has lots of information but its most recent information is from the year 2006. In fact, the downloads in the site's download section all contain different numbers of municipalities, so you don't know which list is accurate. On the other hand, there is the StatsSA data with 2007 census data, that contain a list of municipalities with codes as well. This file was published in March 2008. That's bound to be fairly accurate, no? I've converted the file to a sortable table, if anyone's interested. -- leuce ( talk) 19:57, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
Anyone has any objections to me adding automated archiving to this talk page? That way we can have all the old and stale discussions out of the way. -- NJR_ZA ( talk) 09:48, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 |
This project seems to be dealing with "oodles of data" located all over the show and a central hosting location seems necessary. I don't know of any resources provided by wikimedia and suspect because all of the participants are in South Africa it makes more sense to use a service in South Africa. Does anybody have a server (or decent access to one) lying around that can be used to do the trick? -I can possibly arrange for something but if somebody has a better option or idea ... Paul Hjul 16:57, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
[User:htonl|htonl] has already created a script to automatically generate maps. (Though with user mediation). I propose to create a bot to add census data to municipality pages (possibly with some human mediation). I also propose to use a bot to generate the pages initially: Most of the municipality pages don't exist yet, and there are more than I would want to process through by hand. What we could end up with is a single bot for maintaining South African municipality pages.
Anyway, just a thought (caffeine kicking in). I'm willing to put some time into this. (I think I'd prefer to use Python, rather than Perl - though the two can be integrated). - Kieran 20:50, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
Htonl: I've been speaking to a guy at Stats SA. They're sending me a CD of GIS data, which sounds like it has everything from municipal boundaries right down to wards, with towns and cities added (even where those don't coincide with municipalities). I'm not sure what format it's in, but I'll burn you a copy, if you like. We could probably arrange to meet up somewhere, since I'm also based in Cape Town.
Also, they've sent me an Excel spreadsheet of various data (by pre-2005 boundaries, but there's some other data for converting it to the current ones), so I'll get to work on a Python script to generate text from that in the next week or so. We should probably create a mock-up page, maybe in the project namespace, of how we want the generated pages to look. - Kieran 14:51, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
I've been pondering taking the data send in a spreedsheet and putting it into an SQL datatable seems like a sensible possition. My idea on what the table will need to contain the following fields:
Official Name of Municipality I think its important to stick to official names
Municipal ID
Constituent Part of (Either be a Province Name (in the instance of a District or Metropolitan or the District)
System of Governance For this I believe a direct reference to the section of the Local Government: Municipal Systems Actthat describes the system in play.
Co-ordinates Nice little Geographic Co-ordinate probably should be taken according the middle of the municipality.
Size In terms of land area of the municipality. Large lakes and rivers could pose a problem.
Mayor Just a name and political party
Principal Settlements With the first named settlement being the "seat"
Population According to census
Description Fluffy text block
Using the ID as given by the Demarcation board also allows us to establish coatX.jpg files (where X is the id)
Thoughts? Paul Hjul 09:44, 6 June 2006 (UTC)
We need to decide on a naming convention for all the municipality articles. At the moment, all the Western Cape articles - a complete set - are of the format "XYZ District Municipality, Western Cape" (for districts) or "XYZ Municipality, Western Cape" (for locals). (CoCT is at City of Cape Town.) There are Gauteng articles of the format "XYZ District Municipality", and some Eastern Cape articles of the format "XYZ Municipality, Eastern Cape".
- htonl 18:48, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
On the notion of keeping Metropolitan Municipalities kept as a special case mostly because they are administratively a "different animal altogether" from the District and Local Municipality scene. One problem though is that the provincial link is a problem. As for naming them city XYZ hell no. Two reasons firstly in many cases the municipality and traditional city area do not correspond JHB and Cape Town and secondly several municipalities are X City Municipality (Buffalo City and Mogale City come to mind).
Im not sure that you are right about the City of ... as the official name. In fact IIRC: Cape Town - Cape Town Unicity; Johannesburg - City of Johannesburg or Joburg Metropol (I've seen official letterheads professing such name) Pretoria - Tswane Metropolitan Council; the fight being whether or not an entity of the City of Tswane exists. Also if we work from the premise that each Municipality should have its own Wikipedia page there is no reason why City of Johannesburg should not refer to the entry on Johannesburg (as opposed to Randburg) whilst Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality refers to the wiki page on that juristic entity (the Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality page will be the long article for government with respect to City of Johannesburg). Alternatively there can be the article Johannesburg and Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality and City of Johannesburg shall be a disambiguation page. Essentially the current layout doesn't tell a person what province the Metropols are in. Putting the List of municipalities into tables might help Paul Hjul 09:38, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
Does a person simply add their name to the membership list. I did a bit of work on this last year but circumstances cut down my internet usage and Im now back with a vengence. In terms of wiki editing I am still a rookie to boot. Please help
Are there any templates available for us to work from or should we draw up a list of what should be in the pages. Also doesn't the Dept of Prov and Local Government keep a lot of the needed info (mayors etc ...) in a database?
Uber. I now its a case of translating and looking into a freeking database Paul Hjul 18:05, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
I can probably "host" the data in MySQL datatables with RUCUS if that will help. We'll then need to do the conversions although I suspect that once its in MySQL tables available on the net it will be quicker for people to build bots to generate files Paul Hjul 12:59, 23 June 2006 (UTC)
I've translated Tintazul's template. It's now available at Template:Zamuni. As a test case, I've applied it to Cape Agulhas Local Municipality. - Kieran 18:43, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
I've finished doing my very small bit: coalescing all the habitations, races, and languages data into a single file. (It took a bit of perl - yay! I'm a geek!) The first three lines of the resulting CSV look like this:
You see the fields are separated by ;. I've highlighted here the first line which is the header. The fields shouldn't be too hard to figure out. I've already added all the totals from the races fields into the population field. The field codemuni is the original field from the Stats SA tables, so I left it there in case we need to link to any more data from them. The row order hasn't been changed, either. The fields area; president; party; neighbours; website are empty as I don't know where to fetch that data. neighbours will probably require typing. One of us could do that, the other could check out the result.
I did not understand too well what Kieran said about "charts of the more obscure data (ie: language, energy source, etc)" -- you're probably referring to info I wasn't intending to put on the final document. I love the idea of an automated insert with PyWikiBot (not that I've ever used it.)
I'm done working with the data I have. We need to do some coding to derive actual template fields from data on the table, for instance creating a string of languages greatest percentage first, from the twelve language fields. If you want my CSV just let me know. Cheers. -- Tintazul msg 22:55, 26 June 2006 (UTC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_South_Africa
Over and above the problems with this page (which Im trying to get a discussion on in its page) I think it has some relevance to this project particularly because there isn't a "South African Settlement Project" to my knowledge. The list also has some interesting resources. Paul Hjul 16:57, 8 July 2006 (UTC)
Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 15:04, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 20:02, 29 December 2006 (UTC)
I think this should be merged w/ the South Africa wikiproject. icelandic hur ric ane #12 (talk) 00:50, 16 May 2007 (UTC)
For the purposes of centralized discussion, please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject South Africa#Proposed merger with Wikipedia:WikiProject South African municipalities. Thank you. John Carter ( talk) 17:07, 18 January 2008 (UTC)
G'day everyone! I wonder what we would consider the most accurate or most reliable information on municipalities. The demarcation web site has lots of information but its most recent information is from the year 2006. In fact, the downloads in the site's download section all contain different numbers of municipalities, so you don't know which list is accurate. On the other hand, there is the StatsSA data with 2007 census data, that contain a list of municipalities with codes as well. This file was published in March 2008. That's bound to be fairly accurate, no? I've converted the file to a sortable table, if anyone's interested. -- leuce ( talk) 19:57, 19 April 2009 (UTC)
Anyone has any objections to me adding automated archiving to this talk page? That way we can have all the old and stale discussions out of the way. -- NJR_ZA ( talk) 09:48, 13 November 2009 (UTC)