Wikipedia talk:WikiProject French communes/Archive 1

Motifs et exposés du projet
Merci d'être venu lire ces quelques lignes. J'ai ce projet qui me trotte dans la tête depuis déjà quelques mois, mais aujourd'hui avec la défaite de Paris pour l'obtention des J.O. je crois que c'est ce qui m'a vraiment décidé à me lancer là-dedans. Il me semble qu'un des problèmes dont souffre la France de nos jours c'est un manque de notoriété en dehors du monde francophone, un problème de lobbying en quelque sorte (d'où mon allusion aux J.O. 2012). Nous qui sommes nés ou vivons en France, nous savons à quel point notre pays est riche culturellement, nous avons un patrimoine et une histoire incomparable, et pour ce qui concerne le domaine des encyclopédies, nous avons des trésors d'archives, de bibliothèques multi-centenaires, et de savoirs innombrables. Ce qui me frappe, c'est que cette masse énorme de "material", comme diraient les anglophones, est pour l'essentiel inaccessible à un public non-francophone. Du temps où la langue française était la langue universelle des élites, notre pays était au centre de l'activité intellectuelle, mais aujourd’hui je trouve dommage de constater que la richesse de notre pays est de plus en plus ignorée. Je prendrai un exemple: lorsque j'étais étudiant dans une grande université américaine il y a de cela quelques années, j'avais un professeur spécialiste mondial de la colonisation européenne. Il avait passé sa vie à écrire LE livre de référence sur le sujet, et à ma stupéfaction, il n'y avait pas un mot sur l'empire colonial français, alors que l'empire colonial britannique était traité en long et en large. La seule explication que j'ai pu trouver, c'est que, ne parlant pas français, il n'avait pu se servir des vastes ressources et archives françaises sur l'empire colonial français. Je pourrais donner des exemples comme celui-là à l'infini.

Une des raisons, parmi d'autres, pour lesquelles j'ai commencé à m'impliquer dans le Wikipedia version anglaise, c'est que je voulais rendre accessible à un public non-francophone tout un tas d'informations sur la France, et aussi rétablir certaines vérités, et remettre certains points sur certains i. Je pense que c'est un peu aussi le cas de chacun d'entre vous, d'après ce que j'ai vu de vos edits au fil des mois. Ce que nous faisons ici, je pense que cela contribue plus à la notoriété de notre pays que bien des discours, et en tout cas on aide sûrement à mieux faire comprendre notre pays, qui me semble souvent si mal compris depuis que je vis dans des pays anglophones.

Pour en revenir au sujet, cela fait un bout de temps que je pense que ce serait formidable si on pouvait créer un article pour chaque commune française. Nous sommes le pays au monde qui compte le plus de communes (cf. Commune in France), et donner accès à un public non-francophone à une telle masse d'informations historiques/géographiques/politiques sur plus de 36,000 villes et villages de France serait tout à fait remarquable. La tâche, c'est sûr, paraît gigantesque: 36,782 communes. Il doit y avoir déjà quelques centaines d'articles sur des villes et villages de France, mais cela laisse encore près de 36,000 articles à créer! Pourtant, l'entreprise n'est pas aussi insurmontable qu'il y paraît.

Vous êtes trois Wikipédiens français à qui j'ai envoyé un message (Ericd, Olivier, David.Monniaux), trois des plus actifs contributeurs à Wikipedia version anglaise, et trois des plus sérieux aussi je dois dire. Avec moi inclus, cela fait donc quatre. Voilà ce que je propose: il existe une collection de petits livres baptisée Villes et Villages de France, aux Editions Deslogis-Lacoste. Il existe un petit livre par département français, et dans chaque livre on trouve une notice sur chaque commune du département, avec quelques lignes sur son histoire et sa géographie (un exemple de ces petits livres ici: ). Ce que je propose c'est de créer un article pour chaque commune de France en traduisant la petite notice pour chaque commune. Il existe aussi des petites notices pour chaque commune de France sur www.quid.fr, et on pourrait aussi traduire ces notices et les amalgamer avec les notices de Villes et Villages de France (souvent les deux notices sont identiques... je soupçonne Quid d'avoir dans bien des cas simplement recopié la notice de Villes et Villages de France).

Nous sommes quatre. Si nous créons 10 articles chacun par jour, il nous faudrait 2 ans et demi pour achever le projet (4 * 10 * 365 * 2.5 = 36,500). Je pense que créer 10 articles nous prendrait en gros une heure par jour. Les notices sont très petites, parfois une simple ligne. Bien sûr, si vous connaissez d'autres Wikipédiens français parlant bien l'anglais qui voudraient participer au projet, vous pouvez les contacter. Je pense qu'il faut des Français uniquement: les non-Français auraient trop de mal avec certaines subtilités administratives françaises, où certains points d'histoire locale complexes, et les traductions ne seraient pas toujours bonnes. Si vous avez des amis non-Wikipédiens qui parlent bien l'anglais et qui seraient intéressés par le projet, contactez-les. Je pense qu'il faudrait qu'on ne soit pas plus de 10, sinon ça deviendrait trop difficile à gérer. Pour l'instant on est quatre si vous acceptez tous les trois de vous investir dans le projet, mais on peut accepter d'autres volontaires jusqu'à dix.

Voilà, dites-moi ce que vous en pensez. Réfléchissez bien avant de prendre un décision. C'est sûr que c'est un projet contraignant, qui nécessitera de donnera une heure de son temps tous les jours pendants deux ans et demi (912 jours), mais le résultat serait incroyable: disons que début 2008 il y aurait 800,000 articles sur Wikipedia version anglaise, avec nos 36,000 articles on "pèserait" 4.5% de tous les articles, ce qui serait énorme. Une belle notoriété pour la France. Au passage, les Norvégiens l'ont déjà fait, ils ont créé un article pour toutes leurs communes (Municipalities of Norway) ! Bon, c'est sûr, il n'y a que 433 communes en Norvège, mais si vous êtes aussi dégoûtés que moi après cette nouvelle défaite française aujourd'hui, vous aurez peut-être à coeur de vous impliquer dans le projet.

D'abord on voit qui est partant, et qui n'est pas partant, et après on discutera les modalités pratiques. Hardouin 6 July 2005 18:06 (UTC)


 * So Hardouin posted this message over 9 months ago, yet this doesn't seem to have progressed too far. Why? It is because the Francophones here have to split their time between the French and English Wikipedia? The Wiki project page seems underdeveloped too. And this despite Hardouins stirring, patriotic call to wiki-arms!!?


 * Let's get a move on. Where can people who have extremely bad French like me find a list of French communes -- or "commen Frenchwomen" as it is automatically translated :) for people like me who can read French quicker via Google translator -- for each department to automate the creation of stubs at least. People will be more likely to add content to articles where there is a stub already existing I think, especially your non-Wikipedian friends. &mdash; Донама 03:42, 8 May 2006 (UTC)


 * I noticed two problems with the above: first isn't there a copyright problem copying stuff out of a book? Secondly, suggesting that non-French people keep out of it isn't exactly furthering the cause of rapprochement between the French and the rest of the world. Anyway, and for what it's worth I have created two commune articles, Pontorson, and La Trinité-sur-Mer. I suggest that the way to go is start with communes that have some sort of claim to fame (in these cases, large town near Mont St Michel, and birthplace of Jean Marie Le Pen as well as neighbour of Carnac). I don't see the great benefit in adding communes which are minuscule uninteresting villages inhabited by 6 people. Whereas bigger towns with real histories are completely underdeveloped (see Vannes, for instance).
 * I would also be more inclined to make an effort to get photos and describe the towns as they are now, rather than all this demographic information and history, which is not necessarily interesting. See it:Trinité-sur-mer for instance - tells you nothing about the actual town (I added the photo). Stevage 19:45, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Adding the articles
I'm in agreement with Hardouin's stirring words, and had also independently taken upon myself the task of adding the communes. Having added the first 200 of Ain last night, I was directed to this project and am happy to work with it.

At the moment my starting point is fr.wikipedia and its pages, hoping to transfer the knowledge that many have put effort into posting on the French site over to the English site. I have automated methods of retrieving the French pages and converting key aspects to make creation of the basic commune stub a simple task. At the moment I then create the English version manually from my automatically generated stub. It works on the assumption that the stub on fr.wikipedia has nothing but the Tableau_comm template, and a formulaic intro sentence. The English stubs thus contain the equivalents of these. In addition I add as much of any additional information on a page by translating key parts. However, for longer articles I haven't been translating the whole and more work could be done on this in the future.

As I sweep through the départements, the result should be that there will be an article for all communes that have an equivalent French article. At the moment this isn't quite the case, mainly due to automatic parsing issues that I'll slowly fix.

Any help with the process would of course be appreciated -- let me know and I'll send the scripts to generate the local stub files for a whole département.

Smb1001 14:02, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

Proposed Bot
It's getting late and I'll pick this up tomorrow, but just to describe what I have to date. I've an Oracle DB that holds information about admin structure of communes and data for the stub and a Java program that reads and formats that into a wiki article. Typical output is shown below. I've identified public domain data sources and have started on a screen scraper to put the raw data into my DB.

All the following is machine generated (well I'm cheating a little on Cassini).

Output
Category:France geography stubs it:Template:Stub Francia Category:Subdivisions of France Category:Lists of communes of France Category:Communes of Ain fr:Ain fr:Ambérieu-en-Bugey Ambérieu-en-Bugey is a French commune situated in the department of Ain and the Rhône-Alpes region (préfecture Bourg-en-Bresse).
 * 1) REDIRECT Amberieu-en-Bugey

Demography
Census Enumeration : Population without double-counting

External Links (all sites in French, unless otherwise indicated)

 * Site of the Mayor's Office.
 * Census data for Ambérieu-en-Bugey on the INSEE site.
 * Financial Data for Ambérieu-en-Bugey from the Ministry of the Economy, Finances and Industry.
 * Ministry of Culture site for Ambérieu-en-Bugey.
 * Belltower of Parish Church of Ambérieu-en-Bugey.
 * Office of Tourism website for Ambérieu-en-Bugey.

Map Links

 * Map and list of communes of Ain.
 * Map of Ambérieu-en-Bugey on Michelin (in English).
 * Map of Ambérieu-en-Bugey on Mapquest (in English).
 * Ambérieu-en-Bugey on the Cassini map.
 * Location of Ambérieu-en-Bugey on a map of France (in English).
 * straight-line distance from Ambérieu-en-Bugey to other towns in Ain.

Links which require payment for detailed information

 * Ambérieu-en-Bugey on the Quid site.

Dl yo ns 493  Ta lk  22:04, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

Semi bot
Thanks for the info, Dlyons493. The link generation is a great idea, though I think perhaps needs work, as 5 of the links on your Ambérieu example are 404. Otherwise the concept seems to be much the same as mine.

I've written a perl script to (currently) fetch all the pages for a single département from fr.wikipedia and parse the infobox into the Template:French commune format, as well as the standard intro paragraph, plus category, fr.wiki link, and stub link. In addition the file it produces contains the remainder of whatever text was on the fr.wiki page. I thus take each in turn and paste it in, translating any additional French text that I think deserves adding.

We should certainly take your approach to creating the links section, but I think my way of generating the infobox currently ends up with more info overall as well as using any other French content -- though this last part is obviously beyond the scope of a bot.

You can see many examples of my current output in the pages from Communes_of_the_Ain_d%C3%A9partement (though I've already improved my script as a result of these).

I suspect I can be of perl help in getting more info - perhaps we can get the Lat/Long from your lion1906 links to add to the infobox.

So where now? I'll wrap up my sweep through Ain then we can coordinate plans.

Smb1001 22:35, 26 September 2005 (UTC)

Dead Links etc
The plan was to use the screen-scraper in two ways. Once the links are generated they are passed to it and it does an existence check and reports back - e.g. some communes don't have a mairie or a fr.wiki article and I'd planned the stub would have a section for standard links that don't exist in this particular case.

The other sites are data sites for scraping e.g. INSEE will always exist and I plan to get all commune's demography from there.

I'd planned that all article titles would be in English and to generate a REDIRECT for names containg French accents (that's coded and working).

I was going to use screen-scraper.com (free download of basic software and it's working OK). If necessary I'll buy the pro version as I'll have other uses for it in the future.

Perl is fine but there's quite a bit of inbuilt parsing in screen-scraper that'll hopefully save time. And my Perl is limited (to put it mildly) - but I can always do a crash course if that seems the best way to go. 11:58, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

OK for a bot
The idea of a bot sounds very good to me. I will not go into the technical details, but I would suggest that we agree on a template for the stub articles before the full launch of the bot. Can we pick a bot generated article and make comments on it, in order to refine the standard stub design?

A few remarks: I prefer the second one, to which I have made some modifications. My suggestion is that we further improve this one and use it.
 * There are several existing templates for the infobox, including:
 * Template:French Commune - used by Dlyons493
 * Template:French commune - used by Smb1001

I noticed that the stubs created by Smb1001 do not include a link to the French article. Could that be added? olivier 12:22, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

I suggest that we use the article Le Puy, Doubs, as a reference article for discussion purposes. olivier 13:29, 27 September 2005 (UTC)


 * I'm the creator of Template:French communes and I created it before the other template existed and I didn't even know about this project. I have no problem deprecating it (I just ran into this page actually making Poigny)... although I'm not really sure that it's wise to use the French?  A bot could easily change the French into English for template fields.  Good luck on setting up a bot. gren グレン 10:37, 17 October 2005 (UTC)


 * The template had odd results on Chevrainvilliers. gren グレン 10:44, 17 October 2005 (UTC)

Le Puy, Doubs
(I am moving the following 2 comments from my talk page. olivier 15:08, 27 September 2005 (UTC))

Hi, I notice you've done some cleanup - thanks. Two things maybe worth discussing: Dl yo ns 493  Ta lk  13:41, 27 September 2005 (UTC)
 * Deletion of (doesn’t appear to have any information) from Quid. What I was trying to say there is that Quid is a site that normally should be visited for commune information but that in this case it's so small as not to be listed.  So I'd prefer to either leave the comment in or delete the link totally.  It'll just frustrate anyone following it.
 * Change of template. I deliberately made changes when I copied this from fr.wiki on the basis that boxed titles should be in English (even if the French is more accurate).  Similarly I've been creating page titles without accented characters and creating a redirect from the correct French name.  What are your thoughts on this?


 * Quid: I agree with you. The information available for free usually does not add anything to the suggested infobox. In some cases, though, it might include some historical information. Maybe the bot should leave the link, and this link could be removed manually for those articles which do not contain additional info.
 * Other links: the list of links at the bottom of the article pages is really long. Is there any way to reduce it, maybe less maps?
 * département vs. departement: there have been quite a few discussions about this type of topics in many places in Wikipedia, including in the WikiProject French départements. There seem to be some consensus around keeping the original word, and I definitely agree with that. If you look around, you will find something like 99% occurences of "département" and 1% of "departement". olivier 15:08, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

Response to Olivier
1) Re maps links there's no problem reducing the number as they are largely duplicates of each other. My thinking was that if any of the hosts changed formats then there would still be some working links - ideally we'd either patch to the new format or just delete but I couldn't guarantee doing that in any specific timeframe.

Michelin and Mapquest would probably be the two most familiar on the two sides of the Atlantic?

2) Re template, if there's a concensus on wiki I'm happy to go along with it. Are there any other public domain bits of info (in standard formats on the Web) that might usefully go into a template?

3) Links to fr. article. When I get the screen-scraper working it can check to see if there's an article on fr.wiki and, if it, is then add it into the en. article.  There's a name-matching issue that needs some thinking about - I can standardise on the bot side but there may be different capitalisations etc on the wiki side.

Template
Switching to Template:French commune is OK with me - there aren't substantive differences between that and the version I created. I had thought of removing mayor and term of office as I don't yet have a reliable bot-accessible source. They can be left blank though.

Further comments
Minor comments on the last few sections. Missing off the links to fr.wiki in my Ain articles was an oversight that I've already corrected in my script. One strength of my current method is that the fr.wiki link is guaranteed to be right as I get the basic info from the French page.

Between the templates, I've no strong opinion on colours and the like, but certainly prefer that the left column be in English (though incidentally really don't like the word 'intercommunality', but I guess there's no better label). Thus I think the Template:French commune is currently a bit better and we should concentrate our changes on that.

As for remaining info that isn't easily available from a fetch of an external site, I believe the best source is still the fr.wiki pages themselves. If you like I can do you a csv of 'commune name' to 'fr.wiki page name', and indeed all the details - mayor, altitude, population etc if they are on the French page - as I suspect they were all culled from a single reliable source somewhere.

Smb1001 23:02, 27 September 2005 (UTC)

CSV etc
CSV would be good - possibly easier to mail it to me rather than pasting here. Agree inercommunality is a clumsy word but don't have a better one myself - maybe create a souces, explanations, background etc page and have a link to it in the stub? Dl yo ns 493  Ta lk   07:42, 28 September 2005 (UTC)


 * CSV created and sent to your address. Let me know if you didn't get it. Smb1001 16:07, 2 October 2005 (UTC)
 * Thanks, it arrived all right. Will be a bit distracted next week what with start of term and family stuff.   Dl yo ns 493   Ta lk  16:20, 2 October 2005 (UTC)

Bot to create French administrative division info
I've had Dlyons493Bot approved and run it to create arrondissement stubs - see e.g. Arrondissements of the Ain département. I plan to move on to cantons and communes next. Dl yo ns 493  Ta lk   21:31, 27 November 2005 (UTC)


 * As an intermediate step, I'm currently creating the arrondissements - see e.g. Arrondissement of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges. I had one bit of feedback yesterday to put cantons and communes into multi-column format and I'll look at that.  Any other feedback would be very welcome - especially on templates and categories!   Dl yo ns 493   Ta lk  11:24, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

French communes template
Hello, I left a comment regarding your template for French communes at Template_talk:French_commune regarding latitude/longitude information. Cheers, AxelBoldt 02:12, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

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