Assistance requested for bulk creating articles about Paralympic medalists

[Laura Hale]

Hi,

I'm going to the Sochi Paralympic Games as an accredited reporter representing Wikinews.  I'm bringing with me a team of Ukrainian Wikinews reporters. Because Ukrainian Wikipedia lacks a great deal of Paralympic content and in preparation for Sochi, we are working on creating a way to bulk create articles as many Paralympic medalists and world record holders as possible.  I've also been talking to people involved with four other language Wikipedia projects who have indicated if we can get a standardized data file to allow ease of translation, they would be willing to bulk create articles about Paralympic medalists.

This is a bit of a challenge because there is no comprehensive database of Paralympic medalists from which to start building a script to create these articles.  A lot of the work involves manual data mining and then standardizing the output.  The data that exists is fragmentary, and spread out across multiple languages.  Most of the material is available only in English. Most information provides only one sport or one country at a time. 

I've pretty much standardized what I can and uploaded a copy to http://wikinewsreporter.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/paralympic-medalists-database.xlsx / http://wikinewsreporter.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=69 .  Things like disciplines are just not very feasible to standardize I don't think. (Though it really should be done by me at some point.) 

If anyone has any data that might be useful for bulk creating articles about Paralympic medalists and world record holders, please take a look at the excel file and send me any additional rows you have.

At the moment, I know the records are incomplete.  The data pulls from IPC lists of competitors by country and by sport, classification lists, world and national record lists, rosters from world championships, athlete lists from NPCs and international and national sporting organizations, previous Paralympic Games websites, and a list of categories for individual Paralympians from Wikimedia Commons.  The more complete the dataset, the better stub article creation will be.

Anyway, I'm working with my Ukrainian bulk content developer.  https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:LauraHale/Paralympic_medalist_stub https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D1%83%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%87:LauraHale/Paralympic_stub are the current working drafts of what we'll probably use as a framework for article development in other Wikipedias.   

Any help by providing data would be appreciated, with a particular focus on Winter Paralympians and 2012 Paralympians.

Also, randomly, across all Wikipedia language projects, it looks like there has been about 12 million page views so far as of the first of the year.  This includes about a quarter million total views from Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Dutch and French Wikipedia, half a million total views from German, Polish and Russian Wikipedia , and nearly a million views from Japanese Wikipedia.Some of the most popular Paralympic content (list not complete and only represents English Wikipedia and some Spanish Wikipedia) by monthly totals so far this year are below:

Melissa Stockwell	58,861	April
Jonnie Peacock	34,951	January
Paralympic Games	31,706	February
Aimee Mullins	25,867	February
Paralympic Games	22,661	January
Paralympic Games	21,353	March
Paralympic Games	18,605	July
Jeremy Doyle	18,550	April
Josh Blue	17,858	March
Paralympic Games	17,267	May
The Last Leg	16,148	August
Irene Villa	15,253	January
Paralympic Games	14,522	September
Paralympic Games	13,438	August
Irene Villa	13,411	April
Aimee Mullins	13,174	January
Aimee Mullins	12,171	March
Aimee Mullins	11,715	April
Aimee Mullins	11,590	May
2012 Summer Paralympics	11,177	March
Teresa Perales	11,081	January
Irene Villa	11,037	May
2012 Summer Paralympics	10,723	July
Irene Villa	10,600	February
Brands Hatch	10,518	March
Ellie Simmonds	10,511	February
Irene Villa	10,336	March

Sincerely,

Laura Hale

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