User talk:Dthomsen8/Article from DB

Article creation from a database

From your questions, I gather that you are interested in how to use databases to create articles. I have done it for two separate projects: one was based on the Census of Governments database that I used (with DThomsen8) to create lists of municipal authorities; the other was based on the Wilkes University Election Statistics Project database to create articles on Senators and Representatives. I'm not sure what kind of articles you are thinking about producing, but I hope my experiences with these articles can help. I am going to give you an simple example to demonstrate the principles. Once you get it, then you can get pretty creative. Make sure you have a database program and a word processing program that can work together, like Excel and Word.

The first thing is to create a database in a spreadsheet program. The values in the spreadsheet will be inserted into a block of text to create the articles. Make sure that the data is organized, clean, and uniform. Most spreadsheet programs have "Text-to-column," CONCATENATE, or find+replace codes, all of which can be useful in manipulating your data. Check the spreadsheet help files or google for information on how to use these, if you are unfamiliar. For example, if you are making biographies of politicians, you would want to make the columns a different aspect of the have your database something like

NAME | DISTRICT | YEARBEGIN | YEAREND| PARTY

Each line of your database is going to be a new article. A lot of the content and construction of the database will depend on your data source. This is probably the hardest part, and requires some creative thinking.

The second step is to construct a mock-up article. This will be your template article. Leave spaces in it where you will take the data from your spreadsheet and insert it into the template article. For example:

{NAME}, a member of the {PARTY}, represents the {DISTRICT} district in Ohio. He has held that position from {YEARBEGIN} to {YEAREND}.

So, if you look over that sentence, you can see where the data values from the spreadsheet fit into that sentence to create something intelligible.

Third, you need to use your spreadsheet to perform a mail merge operation in a word processing program. Mail merges can be tricky at first, but you will figure them out eventually. Check the internet for some good step-by-steps that are tailored to whatever spreadsheet/word processing program you use. Then you will get an output that is basically a bunch of articles all in a document. Then, copy and past into wiki.