Wikipedia:Cleanup Taskforce/List of abbreviations in the CIA World Factbook

List of abbreviations in the CIA World Factbook
This is really a mechanical operation, best performed by an editor with skills in regular expressions and a small editing suite. I see the following tasks:
 * 1) remove the wiki links in the abbreviation column, leaving the wiki links in the right hand column
 * 2) alter the &lt;td&gt; and &lt;/td&gt; for the left hand column to &lt;th&gt; and &lt;/th&gt;, which will make the relevant table cells bold easily.

This will make the list a genuinely useful list of abbreviations and their interpretations and will link to the correct articles. More than one left hand column link leads to a disambig page, which makes this page of lower value.

While cleaning up there is a second item, which is where the left hand column really does not appear to be an abbreviation, and is ore like a "shorter clear name" for the content of the right and column. My view is that these rows are better deleted because they are not true abbreviations.

Note the HTML comment on the article page that asks not to disambig the left hand column. While I appreciate the reason it's stated I feel this is erroneous reasoning. People do not visit thsi article to be disambiguated. They visit it to find out what the abbrevs in the CIA book mean. My view would be to override that comment's desire.

Fiddle Faddle 20:07, 27 April 2006 (UTC)


 * A couple of other thoughts for cleanup:


 * 1) I looked a bit more at the HTML for the table. It has &lt;tr&gt; but no corresponding &lt;/tr&gt;, and the same for the tds.
 * 2) What I have in mind, and hence the need for a regex oriented person to do to the edits, since most of it is mechanical, is as follows:


 * As you can see I've grabbed the (current) top table data row, migrated the old left column to the right and added a new column to the left with the abbreviation highlighted as a &lt;th&gt;. But, to do that for the entire list is a slog for character by character editing by keyboard.


 * In terms of layout one might also look at the 'valign' attribute. I'm in favour of 'valign="top"' for &lt;th&gt; eleents and allowing default with &lt;td&gt;


 * Doing this retains the desire of the originator to wikilink the abbreviated text, and renders the list more useful since it is clearer to see what is being looked up.


 * There is an argument that could say "But two columns with similar data are redundant, of course, but this is negated by the uniformity of the look and feel of the left hand column.


 * As you can tell I would have already been bold and done this if I had the relevant expertise to automate the process


 * Fiddle Faddle 19:08, 28 April 2006 (UTC)


 * small update on article talk page. Simple work performed, just the fun stuff left Fiddle Faddle 23:17, 28 April 2006 (UTC)


 * I did it myself in the end. Fiddle Faddle 16:46, 13 May 2006 (UTC)