It feels great to have a big fat knowledge base full of facts but sometimes you can have too much of a good thing.
For example, we know about 19 different places containing Madingley UK. This is great but it does make it hard for the system to give a concise text-based answer to a question like "Where is Madingley?"
What to do - should we give all 19 results, including "the 01223 telephone code area", "US postal group 5", and "the world"? Obviously not. How about only the smallest place containing it? Again, no. This is quite likely to be some obscure electoral district that no-one's ever heard of.
The ideal answer is probably something like "Cambridgeshire, England" or "Cambridgeshire, England, UK". We need some way of deciding which places are interesting enough to use as answers. Obviously countries are all interesting, but where else is? If I ask where Micronesia is then I'd be interested to get "the Southern hemisphere" in the answer, but we probably don't want the hemisphere as part of the answer for Madingley. Does that make it OK to say that the Southern hemisphere is interesting enough to use in answers and not the Northern one, or would that be just too borealocentric?
So far we've labelled all the countries, US states and English counties as 'place is interesting'. We'll be putting in more over the next few days, so come along and join in to help get questions about your town answered well.
