FamilySearch Wiki:WikiProject Integrating Place Standards Database with FamilySearch Wiki

Introduction
An extension was created that can inject a lot of data about places into place pages on the wiki.


 * Authority data would display something like the data in the infobox on Wikipedia's Palo Alto page.

How to merge authorities data with user-submitted page
After integration, when someone wants to add a place page, how would the extension know that the place the customer is creating a page for equals a certain place in the database? Answer: when someone searches for a place, the extension would find possible matches and let the patron select one. For the system to do that, we'd have to write our own search which basically duplicates the search in an internal app called Standard Finder. The day this was demo'd, this app wasn't working. After a search, we waited 30 seconds without a result. This app also resides on Labs, and that iteration of the app produced results quickly.

Merging current place pages with database-generated pages
When the standards database adds data for a place, how would the data get added to a page that already exists for the place? If place pages are categorized with "place", then a bot could transform all our current pages into a mashup.

Making titles readable by both humans and the standards database
We need to modify the extension and/or the skin to show a human-readable title while hiding the "Place:" and the numerical ID. Using namespace to do this is problemmatical: If we include this new namespace in the title, it confuses customers. If the namespace on the title is not displayed, users will not realize why search isn't finding an article (because it's in a namespace which isn't searched by default.)

Don't create millions of stubs
We don't want to create all the place pages at once as stubs which only contain the authority database data.

Issues to work out

 * 1) When users add data to the fields, no data is added to the wiki. When data is added to the first half of the fields, data is written to the standards database. Additions to the second half of the fields would be submitted
 * 2) What's the human-readable part of the title for Jefferson County