Announcement: Finished wiki pages for cruise ports and a call for help, need keywords

[ingo_e]

I just wanted to let you know that I (nearly) finished another great feature for cruise research: I scanned the wikipedia database for pages with GPS coordinates and checked if they are located within one of the city boundary boxes. The result are about 15.000 wikipedia pages about points of interests in 500 cities. I still have to do some fine tuning on mediawiki, but wanted to present the result already now:

 

 

Amsterdam: http://rivercruiseinfo.com/content/c...ci_id=3#tabs-5

Budapest: http://rivercruiseinfo.com/content/c...i_id=35#tabs-5

Nuremberg: http://rivercruiseinfo.com/content/c..._id=144#tabs-5

Prague: http://rivercruiseinfo.com/content/c..._id=159#tabs-5

Paris: http://rivercruiseinfo.com/content/city-index?ci_id=148

 

(Edit: I forgot, the full list of all cities that were listed on cruise itineraries over the last years (and the upcoming season) can be found here: http://rivercruiseinfo.com/content/city-index )

 

If you click on one of the pages, a local wiki opens up and displays the text. Of course, some smaller cities do have only one or two pages, but I think you get an idea. There are still a few hick ups, like missing pictures and wiki templates for info boxes, but I am working on that and think I'll have everything fixed over the course of this month. Depends a bit on how many extra hours I have to work due to the high water issue :(

 

 

Last year, I asked for your help to create a list of categories in order to tag cruises & cities. Originally I had intended to tag all wiki pages myself, but I actually was surprised to end up with so many points of interest, facing 15.000 pages it is just not possible to tag them all by hand. Hence I already added some automatization for searching and tagging pages based on keywords. But I am not sure if I missed something, so this is where I would like to do some crowdsourcing and ask for your help.

 

 

Whats the gain? At the moment, you can already use the wiki (beta version) for research for your upcoming cruise, for this we don't need any keywords. But there are no limits in what we can use this for (and the implementation is rather simple), let me just give you a two use cases that came to my mind:

 

 

 

• Include it in a search mask: Lets say, you are interested in a food, music and arts cruise but don't want to hear anything about World War 2. Easy, as we got the connection from Keywords -> Categories -> Wiki Page -> City -> Cruise Itinerary
  
• Compare different cruises: How about you have narrowed your choice down to two cruises, same length, same rivers, and they share about 80% of the cities on the itinerary. Now we can easily see how big the difference would be, how the other 20% of the ports of call shift the overall storyline of the cruise.
  

For starters I already filled the script with a few dozen keywords and it works like a charm. However I don't consider myself to be an expert in all fields. Hence this post, it would be really great if you participate and do some brainstorming. Write down any termes, names or verbs you associate with the following categories:

 

 

1 Art

2 Music

3 Food

4 Nature

5 Sports

6 Religion

7 Meet the locals

8 Ancient History

9 Medieval History

10 Renaissance

11 Baroque

12 19th Century

13 World War 1

14 World War 2

15 Jewish History

16 Cold War

17 Contemporary History

18 Military History

19 Technology

20 Agriculture

21 Photo Opportunities

 

 

Some keywords may fit in several categories, so don't hesitate to list them multiple times – e.g. “Roman Legion” would be a keyword for the Category “Ancient History” as well as “Military History”. Don't worry about false positives, I can filter them out later on thanks to the magic of statistics :) The script is case insensitive, so ignore upper and lower cases (but special characters like germanic umlaut or french accents need to be mentioned extra).

 

 

I would suggest the easiest way would be if we use the following syntax for each category:

Category Name: Keyword1, Keyword2, Keyword 3...

 

 

You don't need to write down hundreds of keywords (or add keywords for all categories). Of course, the more the better, but that is the beauty of swarm intelligence and crowdsourcing: If everyone just adds 3-7 keywords per category (which doesn't take long), we'll end up with an impressive total number. You would take a lot of work of my shoulders and I have more time to spend on other upcoming features, like the implementation of the two examples I gave and some more cool stuff I am finishing up right now (a weather import script e.g.)

 

Thank you very much for your help and have a nice sunday!

Ingo

Edited May 10, 2015 by ingo_e

[Canal archive]

Please be very careful with Wikipedia there are inacuricies in some cases quite serious I know as In some respects have tried to correct in my field and they have been changed back to completely inaccurate, just a gentle warning.

CA

[ingo_e]

I know, had the same issue when doing research for my masters paper years ago. But in this case it is not important, as a castle remains a castle (though it was built in 1304 instead of 1502) and not a football stadium :)

[notamermaid]

Hello ingo_e,

 

Thank you for all the work you are putting into this project. For lack of time I cannot be of assistance with the keywords at the moment, but may I suggest another port for the city-index. It is Andernach on the Rhine. That port has been on a number of Dutch and British itineraries for years but was added as a port on the APT itinerary last year. It is the base for their experience in Schloss Namedy a little downstream. I believe Namedy, being just a tiny village, has no berth of its own. Thank you.

 

notamermaid