

World Bank Is Opening Its Treasure Chest of Data - bbg
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/business/global/03world.html

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gwern
> People outside the World Bank are eager for its information. Its newly
> released data — from economic stats to numbers on landmines — has attracted
> more than 4.5 million unique views. Indeed, more people come to its Web site
> looking for data than anything else.

> “I’m astonished by the number of people apparently just waiting for our data
> to become free,” says Shaida Badiee, director of the bank’s economic
> development data group. “I had no idea how big a deal this was going to be.”

Free is different. Personally, I'm always surprised when some person or group
radically lowers barriers to participation and then express shock when they
get run over by a herd of contributors. And this from economists, too! You
would think they would be especially sensitive to transaction costs and dead-
weight loss! (Even tech types like Eliezer Yudkowsky make this mistake.)

~~~
Eliezer
[Citation needed]

~~~
gwern
Seriously? I know I'm not one of the leading LW lights or something, but I
thought I could make such references without needing to cite everything. But
since you asked...

<http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/bj6>

~~~
Eliezer
Citation provided. Thank you, it's just that I had no idea what you were
talking about.

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yannis
To find more about the data bank use <http://data.worldbank.org/>

~~~
niel
Great work by the awesome folks at Development Seed!

For more about the tech behind the site, see
[http://developmentseed.org/blog/2010/apr/20/world-bank-
open-...](http://developmentseed.org/blog/2010/apr/20/world-bank-open-data-
initiative-launched-on-drupal)

~~~
yannis
Great work and is all build on open source stack.

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zzleeper
Finally. Even for people working there, or with a paid subscription, using
their "treasure chest" was a PITA.

On the other hand, it was the WB's incompetence that motivated me to learn
Python and write my first script, to scrape their website and get their data
to a more useful and less slow format (mind that I did had a paid subscription
at that time)

~~~
bmelton
WorldBank prides itself on carrying almost no internal IT staff, and outsource
the bulk of their rather large IT infrastructure.

In my opinion, this leads to a disconnect in that the people who would be
exposing the data via APIs likely don't have the understanding of how the data
might be processed as it isn't a part of their business function.

Long-term IT contracts typically bridge that gap eventually, which I am only
guessing is how they're able to expose the data effectively now, if in fact
they can.

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Apocryphon
Maybe this is a response to the IMF hack attacks. If you can't beat 'em, give
them what they want to avoid collateral damage to your other resources.

