Proposal:A central repository of all language independent data

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The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups

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Status (see valid statuses)

The status of this proposal is:
Request for Discussion / Sign-Ups



See also: Proposal:Data.wikimedia.org

Summary

A central repository that will contain all data that are language-independent.

Proposal

  • Create a central repository that will contain all data that are language-independent, with a special emphasis about data that change more often. Examples: census data about towns and countries, statistics about population and other things, names of current presidents and mayors, results of elections, etc.
  • Create some system to use these data on all wikis in an automatic way, so that when a new president is elected in a country, we simply change the name on the repository and all wikis will see it without having to change it manually.

Motivation

On small wikies in particular, it's really difficult to keep data updated, and very often these wikies show wrong or old informations. Big wikies can cope enough well with this issue, but anyway this proposal will save a lot of time and will guarantee a higher degree of accuracy, avoiding possible inconsistencies between different wikies and reducing delays in the updating of data.

This system will also provide an automatic conversion between different units of measurement (example: the data will be stored in kilometers but delivered in miles to wikies that prefer this unit).

Key Questions

If someone asked for an interlingua for machine translation on http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_new_languages , would they be likely to succeed? If not -- and assuming that there hasn't been such an approval that I don't know about -- doesn't that indicate the flawed use of language demand statistics?

Is this the same proposal as Proposal:Data-driven_content in this strategic planning process and should they be merged? And are both a revival of the older Wikidata proposal? --Travelplanner 22:39, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Potential Costs

Technically I think it's feasible. The work of: 1) establishing the central repository, and 2) "distributing" data to all the wikies, can be automatized with a bot. Obviously it will not be very easy, given the huge amount of data that Wikipedia contains.


References

Community Discussion

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