strainu / wlm-iso-3166-2

ISO-3166-2 translations and translation scripts for the Wiki Loves Monuments API

WLM-ISO-3166-2

This repo contains ISO-3166-2 translations and translation scripts for the Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) API. This is a project specifically to provide translations to ISO-3166-2 data for the WLM mobile app (wikimedia/WLMMobile)

How it works

ISO-3166-2 data is taken from a CSV dump from commondatahub.com. The csv gets processed into a file containing a PHP array in this format:

$subdivisions[<country iso code>][<subdivision iso code>] = array(
'name' => <subdivision name>,
'level' => <subdivision level>
);

The CSV is stored in this repo and the file can be generated with parseIso3166-2Dump.php. This file can optionally check subdivision names against English Wikipedia article titles, using redirects from the ISO-3166-2 subdivision name in the CSV to the 'standard' Wikipedia article title to choose what name to use for the subdivision.

The iso3166-2-l10n.php script will take the mappings generated above, and foreach subdivision name, attempt to find a translation using English Wikipedia's interwiki language links. That is, it will query Wiipedia's API for a title (mapped to a subdivision name) and look for article titles mapped in other languages, and use those titles as subdivision names for that language. It will generate language-specific files containing the same PHP array as above, with the subdivision name localized.

Caveats

This is far from perfect. At the moment, it only attempts to perform translations for countries/languages that are being used by the WLM app. Also, as you can imagine, there are many potential problems with relying on Wikipedia page titles for translatons. But it's a cheap, quick, and dirty way to get translated ISO-3166-2 data in a free, open, and mashed up manner!