In the past couple weeks I’ve spent a few minutes here and there adding the Geolinks-US-cityscale template to all 251 Vermont town pages. The template, along with the latitude and longitude of the town (that I got from the Libre Map Project) provide links directly to topographic maps, street maps, and satellite photos. For an example, go to the Marlboro, Vermont page and look at the external links.

Up until now, I’ve done all the Vermont town edits by hand. But it is probably high time I look into creating a robot. Ram-Man was recently using his Rambot robot to add the template to town pages, but he comes and goes, and he appears to be on a wikipedia vacation, for who knows how long.

Before I started my latest series of edits, I checked out the Python Wikipedia Robot Framework. A few examples are included, however, nothing ready made that does quite what I need.

Flickr has finally brought back their Creative Commons section. It was down for way too long. You can select a license then search for photos under that license, but you can only browse the 100 most recent photos which is odd. It does allow you to get a general sense of the popularity of each license:

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License: 548,480 (53.9%)
Attribution-NonCommercial License: 203,232 (20%)
Attribution License: 116,825 (11.5%)
Attribution-ShareAlike License: 110,426 (10.8%)
Attribution-NoDerivs License: 38,641 (3.8%)

Over 70% choose a license that can’t be used for commercial purposes. They also aren’t eligible to be used on Wikipedia.

I had an idea in the shower the other day. Wikipedia has the feature where you can create a link on any article to the equivalent article in another language wikipedia. For example, check out the Wikipedia Germany page. On the left is a list of 67 links to the Germany pages on other wikipedia’s. Now rollover each link and you notice that Germany isn’t called “Germany” in different languages.

So say I want to translate the sentence, “I went to Germany for vacation.” into German. The english wikipedia page for Germany has a link to the Germany wikipedia entry for Germany and that article is Deutschland. Now go to the “Vacation” page on the english wikipedia. The German link goes to an article called, urlaub. Minor words like “I”, “went”, “to”, and “for” could be looked up on the Wiktionary.

Why is this intersting? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it wouldn’t work at all. But I think it is interesting because it is a self-building translation table. Wikipedians are simply creating links, but a bi-product is a human created translation for not just words but events, ideas, etc.