Busy times

To my shame I have neglected the blog in the last month, mostly because I was very busy with working through issues which not directly could be made into a blog post.

One big task has reached another milestone - I finally finished to add the election dates in 2004 which I could deduce from a PDF by the Election Commission listing the term ends of 2008. I now have little over 19,000 council elections in the XML, and a somewhat smaller number of mayor elections since I only added them if I have the name of the mayor, or the term differs from the council term. But sadly the elections aren't done completely yet, this year had another 3,500 local elections. Though there is no concise collective result, at least a good part could be found on the various pages of the province branches of the Election Commission. I am still working on adding those, so more on that in a separate blog posting.

The other task started with my "discovery" of Wikidata. I have now worked through all the Wikipedia articles on the administrative subdivisions and added the ID at Wikidata to all the corresponding entries in my XML. This included several merges of Wikidata entries, where two language editions of Wikipedia had an article but those were not joined yet. Also, some had to be split, the good old confusion between district or subdistrict and the local governments (cities, towns). Now there are 2362 Wikidata items, almost all correspond to at least one Wikipedia article. The next steps are now the programming of a bot to fill these items with statements - I have started and succeeded with a few test edits, but the library to access Wikidata with C# needs a lot of rework before it becomes really usable - so another work to do. At least I have to do some programming, not just XML editing... I detailed analysis of the Wikipedia article I found during this inventory will be posted later, and of course will keep you updated once the TambonBot starts operating.
I wish all my readers a happy Christmas and a good new year, hope I can return to the more regular posting after the holidays.