[mb-users] Is their an artist property for an artists place of birth ?

[Lars Aronsson]

Frederic Da Vitoria wrote:

> I agree to your idea that if a better-suited data source exists 
> somewhere, we should use it, but it doesn't work here for 
> technical reasons. You can't ask wikipedia for composers born in 
> France currently, and you probably never will (if one day 
> wikipedia was able to do this, it would have to change it's name 
> to something like databasepedia ;-) ).

Everybody here seems to think of the English language Wikipedia.
The German language Wikipedia does encode dates and places of 
birth and death in a systematic way.  The starting page (in 
German) is http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilfe:Personendaten

If you buy the DVD edition of the German Wikipedia, a search tool 
for this is included. I think there was a web tool for this search 
as well, but I can't find it at this moment.  A search tool for 
birth dates is available at http://tools.wikimedia.de/~voj/pd/ 
Another tool that appears to be broken is 
http://tools.wikimedia.de/~kolossos/templatetiger/

However, even if the English language Wikipedia doesn't always 
mention the birth place in a systematic way, there are ways to dig 
most of that information out from a database dump.  One project 
that already does such things is http://dbpedia.org/



-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se