Friday, March 16, 2012

#mlwlux - #Wikipedia, how many people do live in #Amsterdam

At the Multilingual Web conference in Luxembourg, it was mentioned that Amsterdam has a different number of people living there depending on what Wikipedia you are reading.

It needs a solution it was said. Yes it does and letting us know is part of a solution. It certainly allows the number for Amsterdam to become the same. A real solution would be one where such data is maintained centrally and served where ever it is needed.

The Wikidata project is starting and one of its objectives is to serve as a central data repository. The people at the conference will appreciate that it is not simple; 783.364 is the number quoted on the Dutch Wikipedia while an American would say that a number like 783,364 is quite a lot more.

Anyway; we do appreciate that the numbers game and the data game is very much something we have fun with in the near future.
Thanks,
      GerardM

1 comment:

Paweł Dyda said...

Wikidata would be one solution. However, please keep in mind that things like number of inhabitants are live and changes with time. Therefore what we really need is not only an access to live, up-to-date and hopefully correct data, but also versioning and history tracking.

Now, that's challenging.