Thanks to those who helped out with Ed’s Motorcycle data mob last week!
This week our subject is places of worship, worldwide and for all religions.
We’ve listed weblinks on our data mob page. Start there, choosing whatever religion or type of place of worship takes your fancy. Get a list of mosques, temples, basilicas, or whatever, and import them using our list import tool.
That’s a good start, but it’s not all we need to do: many of the items in those lists don’t yet exist in Freebase, so choosing “Add new” in the import tool will create a topic, but we won’t know anything more about it than that it’s a place of worship. This can cause trouble for us later, for instance if we try to reconcile against another data set.
So, take the time to visit the topic pages for any places of worship you add, and note the type of place of worship, religion, and at least a rough location (even knowing the country is better than nothing.) Since “place of worship” includes “building” and “structure”, you can also note information pertinent to those topics, such as the date the place of worship was built, or who the architect was, if you happen to know that information or can glean it from another source such as Wikipedia.
There’s also a better way to pre-fill some of this data. Rather than starting from the list import tool linked above, start from a specific religion or type of place of worship, like Mormonism or Gurdwara. If necessary, click on the “N empty fields” link to open out all the empty fields for editing. The click on the arrow next to “Places of worship (current)” or “Places of worship of this type” and choose “Import list”.
This will take you to the list importer, but it will not only create places of worship, it will also note the relevant religion and/or type of place of worship.
When you’re doing importing, tell us about it by adding your work to the list of “Mobbed Topics”.
FYI, the current count of places of worship is 640, mostly Buddhist, Shinto, and Hindu temples and shrines added by Robert the other day. Let’s see if we can at least double that.
