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majewsky

Look at Wikipedia's lists of things. For your particular examples:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._state

Some of them are quite meta, such as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists

For a more structured source, Wikidata aims to be that, but I cannot comment on its completeness.

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Often times instead of the list of US Sates, you actually want to list of US States and Territories:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories...

For example when the intent is "list of place where the USPS ships" or "list of state-level political jurisdictions where US residents live"

Let’s move this tidbit to a structered api of common knowledge! Dewey decimal for data, not just a generic search engine for datasets in different formats (like the recent google datasets site), but a familiar, goto resource.

Um...why not https://www.wikidata.org/ ?

Have you ever used wikidata? It's kind of a shitshow.

Yes! Surprisingly often I am unable to complete a form because there is no option in the State field for Washington, DC.

Structured, maintained API though, not general knowledge. I personally see an issue that someone has to accumulate their own stash of structured data for common knowledge (random examples) like: countries, zip codes, valid HTML5 element names, css properties, hex colors, common naming prefix/suffixes/professional titles, etc. A growing list of work repeated by each dev team/company for really no reason. No complaint about this repo, at all, just seeking if a solution exists.

Here's a platform specific example. https://github.com/SmileyChris/django-countries/

There is Corpora: https://github.com/dariusk/corpora/tree/master/data

Thanks, will check it out.

> Corpora is a collection of small files. It is not meant to be an exhaustive source of anything: a list of resources should contain somewhere in the vicinity of 1000 items.

Wikidata has a SPARQL API though

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