Wikidata:WikiProject Gazetteer
The WikiProject Gazetteer aims to provide correct, complete and up-to-date information about places, municipalities and regions. Initially data about the population and area is added to Wikidata from official sources for use in Wikipedia Infoboxes and beyond.
Population data for places and regions is often out of date for many years on Wikipedia. This is due to the fact that the various language editions contain thousands to millions of these articles. Updating this information by hand is a Sisyphean task as statistical offices issue at least yearly updates. Clever templates (i.e. Metadata) have been devised that contain population data for the places in an entire country, now only a single page needs to be updated. Still each and every language has to be updated individually and most Wikipedias don't even have templates for all regions instead they track the population in each article.
If Wikipedias instead use population and area data from Wikidata they can always have correct and up-to-date articles without any ongoing maintenance. The premise is that Wikidata is a dependable source for this data. To ensure this we will:
- procure data directly from official sources (i.e. statistical offices),
- include sources with every statement,
- describe in detail what data and for which regions is supported by this project,
- monitor and revert vandalism on statements,
- split the work between a team of volunteers and publish all tools used.
Statements[edit]
For each place the population and area should be added and kept up-to-date. These statements must have a point in time (P585) qualifier and a proper source. In addition the place/municipality key is needed to align Wikidata entities to official records.
- official place/municipality key, depending on region:
- area (P2046)
- surface area
- water surface area (see discussion at Wikidata:Property_proposal/Water_area and water as percent of area (P2927))
- population (P1082)
- last census, with qualifier determination method (P459)census (Q39825)
- current official estimate, with qualifier determination method (P459)project management estimation (Q965330)
Additional and historic population data should be stored as Tabular Data on Wikimedia Commons and linked with tabular population (P4179). For some regions not all data may be available, then only the available information is added.
Participants[edit]
The participants listed below can be notified using the following template in discussions:{{Ping project|Gazetteer}}