GeoNames Forum

Sorry if I come through as an idiot, but I need to clarify some things, becasue I don't understand, how this thing here works.

I need to find wiki articles based on geo locations. I have found the webservice http://www.geonames.org/export/wikipedia-webservice.html#findNearbyWikipedia

I think that would suit my needs the best.

Now my questions:

1. can I use it for free without those 2000 credit limits? I can't afford to run out of service, but I have no clue, how many requests i will have / how many credits I need and I have no €500 to find out, sorry. I don't even know, what do credits mean... I just know, they are somehow tied to usage, because I already got error messages about those credits.

2. How and where do I get an other username, than "demo"?

3. If I download the database and I make my own SQL database, can I use it to find wiki articles?

4. how often are those database dumps updated? How often can I update my database from those dumps?

Thanks for the answers.

1. http://www.geonames.org/export/credits.html
2. http://www.geonames.org/export/web-services.html
3. wikipedia articles are not included in the extracts
4. the extracts are daily exports, the wikipedia data used for the webservice is updated once or twice per year.

Hi there, I'm another user, so not an expert, but I'll try to answer.

The credits are to limit how much you are hitting the GN servers. It's 2,000/hour and 30,000/day, I believe, and after that you get an error saying you're out of credits. 1 query = 1 credit. I designing my app to wait out the rest of the hour/day after getting one of those message, but I also added a bunch of features to avoid querying GN unless absolutely necessary. So I keep and build up various local lists and stoplists. My app should never look up the same thing twice.

It's hard for me to tell because I've already done it, but you should be able to create an account here: http://www.geonames.org/manageaccount and then you sign it up for web services.

I don't know about the downloading issues as I haven't been using it that way.

Hope this helps.