Wikipedia talk:WikiProject South Africa/Municipalities task force/Archive 1

Archive 1

Oodles of data

This project seems to be dealing with "oodles of data" located all over the show and a central hosting location seems necessary. I don't know of any resources provided by wikimedia and suspect because all of the participants are in South Africa it makes more sense to use a service in South Africa. Does anybody have a server (or decent access to one) lying around that can be used to do the trick? -I can possibly arrange for something but if somebody has a better option or idea ... Paul Hjul 16:57, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Bots

[User:htonl|htonl] has already created a script to automatically generate maps. (Though with user mediation). I propose to create a bot to add census data to municipality pages (possibly with some human mediation). I also propose to use a bot to generate the pages initially: Most of the municipality pages don't exist yet, and there are more than I would want to process through by hand. What we could end up with is a single bot for maintaining South African municipality pages.

Anyway, just a thought (caffeine kicking in). I'm willing to put some time into this. (I think I'd prefer to use Python, rather than Perl - though the two can be integrated). -Kieran 20:50, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

I'd agree with you on the Python thing. The reason that I used Perl was because it has a module for reading Shapefiles (which is the format that the demarcation data comes in). Maybe one could rewrite the scripts in Python using the bindings to GDAL. As for the user-mediation question, the only mediation necessary is uploading the maps to the Commons, and adding labels to the maps showing the local municipalities in a district or the wards in a local municipality. There doesn't appear to be an algorithm for reliably placing labels within map regions; if you can find one, that would be great. - htonl 21:03, 11 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm busy trying to get hold of StatsSA, to ask about the copyright status of their publications. They offer a GIS cd of all the census 2001 data, which could be handy as a computationally tractable format. On the topic of labels: Does it matter if the labels aren't entirely within the bounds of the region? There are strangely shaped regions that won't take a label, anyway, and I think most users will be happy as long as the label is identifiable. One way of doing this might be to put the label in the centroid (though I guess really oddly-shaped regions might break this (eg: heavily concave) ). We could also upload unlabelled copies of the maps to commons, so that, if there are problems, individual users can re-label the maps themselves. (This also allows people to generate their own maps). -196.38.143.211 15:36, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, in fact the maps are SVG images and thus can be very easily edited, including changing/removing labels. I was thinking about uploading blanks (in case the Afrikaans/Xhosa/Zulu Wikipedias wanted to put on their own labels), but then I realised they can just edit the SVG if they want to.

About the label placement, we could try the centroid, but there are pathological cases (like labelling the Western Cape on a map of SA) where it doesn't work. I guess we could just edit special cases manually if they don't work. - htonl 22:52, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I think a bit of QA is going to be necessary, even if we automate everything. The automation should still save a lot of effort, though. In terms of translingual labels, though: Do municipalities have different names in different languages? My impression was that, since they're all derived from different languages to start with, the same names get used across languages, but maybe it's not so?

Also, there seems to be a lot of free GIS software around - maybe there's something that does intelligent label placement? -Kieran 17:26, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

I suspect that, for example, WC025 (Breede Valley in English) would be referred to as Breedevallei in Afrikaans. I think we should just upload label-free maps, thus avoiding both the language and positioning issues. I've been googling around about label placement algorithms, but apparently it's an NP-hard problem, and "notorious" amongst GIS experts. - htonl 13:47, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

GIS and census data

Htonl: I've been speaking to a guy at Stats SA. They're sending me a CD of GIS data, which sounds like it has everything from municipal boundaries right down to wards, with towns and cities added (even where those don't coincide with municipalities). I'm not sure what format it's in, but I'll burn you a copy, if you like. We could probably arrange to meet up somewhere, since I'm also based in Cape Town.

Also, they've sent me an Excel spreadsheet of various data (by pre-2005 boundaries, but there's some other data for converting it to the current ones), so I'll get to work on a Python script to generate text from that in the next week or so. We should probably create a mock-up page, maybe in the project namespace, of how we want the generated pages to look. -Kieran 14:51, 23 February 2006 (UTC)

I've been pondering taking the data send in a spreedsheet and putting it into an SQL datatable seems like a sensible possition. My idea on what the table will need to contain the following fields:

Official Name of Municipality I think its important to stick to official names

Municipal ID

Constituent Part of (Either be a Province Name (in the instance of a District or Metropolitan or the District)

System of Governance For this I believe a direct reference to the section of the Local Government: Municipal Systems Actthat describes the system in play.

Co-ordinates Nice little Geographic Co-ordinate probably should be taken according the middle of the municipality.

Size In terms of land area of the municipality. Large lakes and rivers could pose a problem.

Mayor Just a name and political party

Principal Settlements With the first named settlement being the "seat"

Population According to census

Description Fluffy text block

Using the ID as given by the Demarcation board also allows us to establish coatX.jpg files (where X is the id)

Thoughts? Paul Hjul 09:44, 6 June 2006 (UTC)

Naming convention

We need to decide on a naming convention for all the municipality articles. At the moment, all the Western Cape articles - a complete set - are of the format "XYZ District Municipality, Western Cape" (for districts) or "XYZ Municipality, Western Cape" (for locals). (CoCT is at City of Cape Town.) There are Gauteng articles of the format "XYZ District Municipality", and some Eastern Cape articles of the format "XYZ Municipality, Eastern Cape".

Proposal

• All local municipalities are named "XYZ Local Municipality".
• All district municipalities are named "XYZ District Municipality".
• Existing articles are moved to the appropriate name as designated above.
• Metro municipalities are treated as special cases, to be decided later by consensus.

• Alternative: Metro municipalities to be named "XYZ Metropolitan Municipality" for the Municipal entity page with City of XYZ linking to a disambiguation page and the names of the old settlements being kept pretty much as is with the governance or politics section containing a link to the "XYZ Metropolitan Municipality" as the longer article. Paul Hjul 10:02, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

In the 2008 StatsSA file, all local municipalities are named "XYZ Local Municipality" except in two cases, namely "Local Municipality of Madibeng" and "City of Matlosana". It would seem that these are the official names, so I suggest we stick to that.

In the StatsSA file, district municipalities do not have "District Municipality" in their names, so I would suggest we follow a naming scheme where "(district municipality)" is added after the name (although I'm also happy with [List_of_South_African_Municipalities|the solution that was followed here].

Also, district management areas (DMAs) do not have anything after their names, even though their names often overlap with district municipality names. For this reason I think we should add "(district management area)" behind their names, as I have done here. Finally, there are four local municipalities that share two names, and in those cases we should add the province to the name.

As for the metropolitan municipalities, all of them can have "Metropolitan Municipality" behind their name or not -- it is optional. However, Nelson Mandela Bay is an exception, because if you remove "Metropolitan Municipality" then you have to add "Metro".

Two local municipalities' names begin with "The", and I think we should regard that as part of the official name and include it in the Wikipedia articles (perhaps with an interesting comment that the municipality has "The" in its official name, to discourage people from editing it out). -- leuce (talk) 20:10, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Rationale

• "XYZ {Local|District} Municipality" is the name used by the Municipal Demarcation Board on its website.
• It is not necessary to add a ", Province Name" or ", South Africa" suffix to the names. With the inclusion of " Local Municipality" or " District Municipality", and given that almost all municipality names are in indigenous South African languages, the chances of a namespace conflict are infinitesimal.
• Many metro municipality articles (like City of Tshwane) attract attention from editors not attached to this project; thus we cannot find consensus here for naming of these articles. Since there are only six of them, they can be treated as special cases. Furthermore, three metros are referred to as "City of XYZ" rather than "XYZ Metropolitan Municipality", so there is essentially no naming convention for them.

- htonl 18:48, 27 February 2006 (UTC)

I agree with all these points. If a conflict happens with names, it can be sorted out with a disambiguation page. I also agree that the province/South Africa is unnecessary in the name (the categories and text should provide that information). I would suggest that maybe we add redirect pages with just the municipality name (without "municipality"), where the name doesn't refer to something else (eg: Breede River). -Kieran 12:04, 1 March 2006 (UTC)

Great! I see you've added this to the project page. I'm going to start moving the Western Cape articles (Eskom permitting, of course). I agree with you about the redirect pages.

On the notion of keeping Metropolitan Municipalities kept as a special case mostly because they are administratively a "different animal altogether" from the District and Local Municipality scene. One problem though is that the provincial link is a problem. As for naming them city XYZ hell no. Two reasons firstly in many cases the municipality and traditional city area do not correspond JHB and Cape Town and secondly several municipalities are X City Municipality (Buffalo City and Mogale City come to mind).

Thing is, though, that Buffalo City and Mogale City are actually local municipalities, not metro municipalities, despite the names. As far as I can tell, the full official names for the metro municipalities for Cape Town, Joburg and Pretoria are, in fact, "City of (Cape Town|Johannesburg|Tshwane) Metropolitan Municipality". As to the municipality and the traditional city area not corresponding, that's why we have separate articles like Cape Town vs. City of Cape Town. What do you mean by the provincial link being a problem? - htonl 17:35, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Im not sure that you are right about the City of ... as the official name. In fact IIRC: Cape Town - Cape Town Unicity; Johannesburg - City of Johannesburg or Joburg Metropol (I've seen official letterheads professing such name) Pretoria - Tswane Metropolitan Council; the fight being whether or not an entity of the City of Tswane exists. Also if we work from the premise that each Municipality should have its own Wikipedia page there is no reason why City of Johannesburg should not refer to the entry on Johannesburg (as opposed to Randburg) whilst Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality refers to the wiki page on that juristic entity (the Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality page will be the long article for government with respect to City of Johannesburg). Alternatively there can be the article Johannesburg and Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality and City of Johannesburg shall be a disambiguation page. Essentially the current layout doesn't tell a person what province the Metropols are in. Putting the List of municipalities into tables might help Paul Hjul 09:38, 23 May 2006 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure about it. To check for yourself, download the database of municipality names from the Municipal Demarcation Board. (Once unzippled, you can open it in Excel or OpenOffice.) It shows that the names are in fact as we have them in List of South African Municipalities. (It should, since that list was generated from the database.) You can also see by selecting the municipality from the drop-down lists on the MDB site; for example, here is the page for Cape Town.

Unfortunately, the municipalities themselves are often confused about their correct names. If you look at the Cape Town, Joburg and Tshwane websites, you can see that they refer to themselves as "City of (Cape Town|Johannesburg|Tshwane)" (ommitting the "Metropolitan Municipality" part). The designation "Cape Town Unicity" has only ever been an unofficial name for what was the Cape Metropolitan Administration and is now the City of Cape Town Metropolitan Municipality; "Johannesburg Metropole" and "Tshwane Metro Council" may have been official names under the transitional system (I am not sure) but are definitely not names for the municipalities now. I know that with Tshwane, the issue was that they had to call it the full "City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality" because calling it just "City of Tshwane" implied that the city called Pretoria was actually called Tshwane.

As for disambiguation, at the moment for Cape Town, at least, we have Cape Town for the geographical city and City of Cape Town for the municipality; I would have no problem with changing that to have City of Cape Town Metropolitan Municipality for the municipality and City of Cape Town as a disambiguation page between the two. But I would strenuously object to having Cape Town Unicity or Cape Town Metropolitan Municipality as the name for the municipality article, since neither of those are the correct name for it.

What you say about the provinces is quite true, if you are referring to the List of South African Municipalities; maybe we should list the metropolitan municipalities under the province headings like the others, or we could say which province each one was in next to it? - htonl 12:20, 23 May 2006 (UTC) Alternatively we can build the entire list into a prettier looking table structure with Metros having one table and each province another Paul Hjul 10:15, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

I don't think seeing different names for one metro is necessarily a case of confusion. It may simply be a marketing tactic of that place to use a different name. For example, joburg.org.za instead of city-of-johannesburg-metropolitan-municipality.org.za. And I think we should have a solution that will go beyond struggles of the Afrikaner for placenames (eg City of Tswane versus Pretoria). On the other hand, see how Louis Trichard (the town) got its name back even though the local municipality is still named Makhado Local Municipality. -- leuce (talk) 20:17, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Membership

Does a person simply add their name to the membership list. I did a bit of work on this last year but circumstances cut down my internet usage and Im now back with a vengence. In terms of wiki editing I am still a rookie to boot. Please help

Sure! All you have to do to join is to add a line like "# ~~~~" (without the quotes) on a new line at the end of the list of members. The ~~~~ will automatically expand to your username and a timestamp. - htonl 17:20, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Templates

Are there any templates available for us to work from or should we draw up a list of what should be in the pages. Also doesn't the Dept of Prov and Local Government keep a lot of the needed info (mayors etc ...) in a database?

Well, I've created a template for the Portuguese Wikipedia, see for example Overberg DMA and Theewaterskloof. I am trying to start up a South Africa project in Portuguese, let's see how that goes.

I usually don't edit the English wiki (pt keeps my hands full as it is), but I may cooperate with you, particularly in creating data which may be shared between pt and en (and af and zu and what not.)

My template (pt:Predefinição:Info/Município ZA) is being used for district, local and metropolitan municipalities, as well as district management areas. I've included the following info in it:

1. not the district's name, as this can be gleaned by {{{PAGENAME}}}
2. higher-order subdivision
3. map - by the way, kudos to Htonl for his great SVG maps! I've created the Overberg DMA map from one of his, and couldn't believe how easy that was! With proper labels on the SVG, too. Neat.
4. code
5. land area in sq km (integer)
6. adjacency, municipalities as well as oceans, clockwise from north
7. president, followed by party name in parenthesis
8. population - we use a dot (.) as thousands separator
9. population density - one decimal digit if under 10, none if 10 or more; note that like you, we use a decimal comma (,)
10. households
11. household density - same rounding rule as population density
12. racial composition - a list of races and percentages, ordered down, not showing data items under 1%. Percentage as an integer value to avoid overloading readers with data.
13. languages - same as races, but with links to language articles; including "other" when over 1%. Note that this "other" means other languages not listed here, not "non-official languages": supposing official data for a given municipality were afrikaans 87,9%, english 5,4%, xhosa 5,9%, sepedi 0,4%, other 0,3%, I would list these as afrikaans 88%, xhosa 6%, english 5%, other 1%.
14. official web site, in wiki format [uri alt text]

If you'd like my help, please let me know. Cheers -- Tintazul 13:02, 14 June 2006 (UTC)

Uber. I now its a case of translating and looking into a freeking database Paul Hjul 18:05, 20 June 2006 (UTC)

I've got the data from Stats SA as Excel files. I am now turning it into an OpenOffice database. If you have any tips or questions just let me know. The data I have consists of municipality code and name, population by race, main language, and number of households. I need to find the data for surface area, adjacency, president and party, and official web site. Any of you care to find this?

I've left behind some info which I don't think fits too well a general article on a municipality: religion and source of energy for cooking or lighting, for instance. Any comments?

Also, do any of you "own" a bot which would create the articles from the database text using a template? I may ask one of the Portuguese admins if you don't. -- Tintazul 18:21, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

I can probably "host" the data in MySQL datatables with RUCUS if that will help. We'll then need to do the conversions although I suspect that once its in MySQL tables available on the net it will be quicker for people to build bots to generate files Paul Hjul 12:59, 23 June 2006 (UTC)

I'm working on a bot in Python to create charts of the more obscure data (ie: language, energy source, etc). However, since I'm loading the data anyway, my intent was to extend the bot to create templates, and some page text, using PyWikiBot. Paul, if you're able to load all the census data into a MySQL database, I'd be really appreciative. So far, I've had to manually split the data in the excel file from Stats SA, and export the sub-tables I generated as csv, which Python can handle without too much trouble. I'd guess you'll encounter the same problems with the data, but it would be a fun exercise in database design. I suspect you'd have to split the DB into tables by the sections used in the excel file (ie: race, home language, age distribution, etc), but relate these back to a central municipalites table. Anyway, if you manage to do it, tell me. -Kieran 17:18, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

Zamuni template ready for use

I've translated Tintazul's template. It's now available at Template:Zamuni. As a test case, I've applied it to Cape Agulhas Local Municipality. -Kieran 18:43, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

In the Neighbours section on wiki pt I abbreviate the Municipality name, say I link to Theewaterskloof Local Municipality thus: Theewaterskloof. That makes the infobox more readable.

Now, are any of you collecting data again? I have the languages and races as a CSV file, should I send it to you? Should I keep working on it? If you want the texts via e-mail, use "E-mail this user" feature to let me know your e-mail address. -- Tintazul ^msg 09:27, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

Habitations, Races, Languages

I've finished doing my very small bit: coalescing all the habitations, races, and languages data into a single file. (It took a bit of perl - yay! I'm a geek!) The first three lines of the resulting CSV look like this:

1. code; municipality; codemuni; habitations; black; coloured; indian; white; population; area; afrikaans; english; ndebele; xhosa; zulu; pedi; sotho; tswana; swati; venda; tsonga; other; president; party; neighbours; website
2. CBLC1; Ga-Segonyana; CBLC1: Ga-Segonyana; 17161; 61158; 5337; 70; 3825; 70390; ; 9314; 379; 75; 668; 163; 163; 268; 59166; 82; 16; 53; 43; ; ; ;
3. NC01B1; Gamagara; NC01B1: Gamagara; 3792; 7770; 4030; 6; 4369; 16175; ; 8704; 161; 22; 221; 78; 47; 143; 6385; 16; 27; 10; 361; ; ; ;

You see the fields are separated by ;. I've highlighted here the first line which is the header. The fields shouldn't be too hard to figure out. I've already added all the totals from the races fields into the population field. The field codemuni is the original field from the Stats SA tables, so I left it there in case we need to link to any more data from them. The row order hasn't been changed, either. The fields area; president; party; neighbours; website are empty as I don't know where to fetch that data. neighbours will probably require typing. One of us could do that, the other could check out the result.

I did not understand too well what Kieran said about "charts of the more obscure data (ie: language, energy source, etc)" -- you're probably referring to info I wasn't intending to put on the final document. I love the idea of an automated insert with PyWikiBot (not that I've ever used it.)

I'm done working with the data I have. We need to do some coding to derive actual template fields from data on the table, for instance creating a string of languages greatest percentage first, from the twelve language fields. If you want my CSV just let me know. Cheers. -- Tintazul ^msg 22:55, 26 June 2006 (UTC)

w00t! Please send it to me. It should be really simple to load all that info up, and produce a template. I'll have to think a little about making it language-agnostic, so you can use it for the pt Wiki, and we can possibly use it in future for af, zu, etc. My intention had been to write a semi-bot, ie: one requiring a fair bit of user interaction. As far as I can tell, such a bot can be run in one's own user account, and doesn't require special permission. My reasoning is that we should do a fair bit of checking for existing articles before automatically creating new ones.

One thing, though: Some of the municipal boundaries have changed since 2002. Stats SA does have a spreadsheet with information to help converting the 2002 data to the new municpalities. Have you applied this? (We need to be careful that we don't create pages for municipalities which no longer exist.) -Kieran 01:49, 28 June 2006 (UTC)

South African Cities Page

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_South_Africa

Over and above the problems with this page (which Im trying to get a discussion on in its page) I think it has some relevance to this project particularly because there isn't a "South African Settlement Project" to my knowledge. The list also has some interesting resources.Paul Hjul 16:57, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Project directory

Hello. The WikiProject Council has recently updated the Wikipedia:WikiProject Council/Directory. This new directory includes a variety of categories and subcategories which will, with luck, potentially draw new members to the projects who are interested in those specific subjects. Please review the directory and make any changes to the entries for your project that you see fit. There is also a directory of portals, at User:B2T2/Portal, listing all the existing portals. Feel free to add any of them to the portals or comments section of your entries in the directory. The three columns regarding assessment, peer review, and collaboration are included in the directory for both the use of the projects themselves and for that of others. Having such departments will allow a project to more quickly and easily identify its most important articles and its articles in greatest need of improvement. If you have not already done so, please consider whether your project would benefit from having departments which deal in these matters. It is my hope that all the changes to the directory can be finished by the first of next month. Please feel free to make any changes you see fit to the entries for your project before then. If you should have any questions regarding this matter, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you. B2T2 15:04, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Wikipedia Day Awards

Hello, all. It was initially my hope to try to have this done as part of Esperanza's proposal for an appreciation week to end on Wikipedia Day, January 15. However, several people have once again proposed the entirety of Esperanza for deletion, so that might not work. It was the intention of the Appreciation Week proposal to set aside a given time when the various individuals who have made significant, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia would be recognized and honored. I believe that, with some effort, this could still be done. My proposal is to, with luck, try to organize the various WikiProjects and other entities of wikipedia to take part in a larger celebrartion of its contributors to take place in January, probably beginning January 15, 2007. I have created yet another new subpage for myself (a weakness of mine, I'm afraid) at User talk:Badbilltucker/Appreciation Week where I would greatly appreciate any indications from the members of this project as to whether and how they might be willing and/or able to assist in recognizing the contributions of our editors. Thank you for your attention. Badbilltucker 20:02, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

Merge

I think this should be merged w/ the South Africa wikiproject. icelandic hurricane #12 _(talk) 00:50, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

Proposed merger with WikiProject South Africa

For the purposes of centralized discussion, please see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject South Africa#Proposed merger with Wikipedia:WikiProject South African municipalities. Thank you. John Carter (talk) 17:07, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

Latest accurate information about municipalities

G'day everyone! I wonder what we would consider the most accurate or most reliable information on municipalities. The demarcation web site has lots of information but its most recent information is from the year 2006. In fact, the downloads in the site's download section all contain different numbers of municipalities, so you don't know which list is accurate. On the other hand, there is the StatsSA data with 2007 census data, that contain a list of municipalities with codes as well. This file was published in March 2008. That's bound to be fairly accurate, no? I've converted the file to a sortable table, if anyone's interested. -- leuce (talk) 19:57, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

Automated archiving

Anyone has any objections to me adding automated archiving to this talk page? That way we can have all the old and stale discussions out of the way. --NJR_ZA (talk) 09:48, 13 November 2009 (UTC)