The nearest Wikipedia entry to me is about a 3 hours 15 minute walk away, the nearest town. But there are so many interesting things closer, perhaps I should add them to the wiki. Twenty minutes to the north there's a pleasant shady area at the bottom of a canyon with a fallen log with a curve that fits my buttocks nicely. Fifteen minutes to the southeast there is a dead elk cow that has only been 3/4 eaten by the local coyotes, etc., and has a quite remarkable odor. To the northeast is the spot where I found a perfect arrowhead, the prize of my collection. But maybe it's better for me to horde these places to myself.
Your description excited me to click the link. Then I was met with a generic landing page and then clicking map didn’t show me a map. It should just be a map with the stories immediately available as markers. Then clicking through to an about link should take you to that secondary content.
I agree. What I expected was a place for very personal little stories and journals about specific, hyperlocal spots on Earth. What I got was an empty site for public polls on restaurants in large cities.
You could seed the map by scraping things like local papers, historical archives, reviews of all kinds, etc. maybe giving them a less prominent appearance compared to user submitted. Getting people using and exploring the tool right away instead of being met with walls of copy and detached forums might be a good move. You could pull the old reddit move and spend a few days adding a tonne of your own stories under different names and/or try and find some others that would be interested in doing the same. Others here would probably tell you to just use LLMs, but I'd avoid that.
As it stands I think you will have a hard time getting people to start filling your database.
My plan is indeed to seed some initial data from areas that I know well.
I'm quite into paddle boarding at the moment and in the UK there are a lot of good places to launch from that are not well known so that would be a good niche to start with.
I wonder if its more common to notice interesting and special places when in nature versus in the built environment. All of your examples are from nature, and most of mine would be too. But considering it further... in college there was a nook I found on the second floor of a nondescript building, where lounge chairs were built into the floor and covered with astroturf, and at just after midday the sun would shine down on it through a sort of compluvium in the roof. I'd been on that campus for almost three years before I discovered it, and only visited a few times because it was quite out of the way. But what a quiet little refuge, I hope its still there.
Indeed. The project in the OP is nonsensical to me, because it's impossible to get the desired result by filtering the real Wikipedia. The articles you'd actually want it to have would blatantly violate WP:N, WP:NPOV and especially WP:NOR.
Weird psychological quirk: otherwise banal articles seem much more pertinent when they happen to be nearby (I just read about a random plane crash from decades ago but felt very invested in it, due to proximity).
Wonder if this is related to the biological phenomena of humans tending to care more about humans who resemble themselves than those who don't (homophily)
I don't know if that is a psychological quirk - it seems pretty rational to me. We are more affected by events that happen close to us than those that happen far away, so instinctively finding local events more interesting than distant ones seems like what I'd expect[0].
[0] Not that my expectation has any weight, I have close to zero knowledge of psychology.
Unless you are in a highly urban area, most Wiki articles will be about _places_ and sometimes _events at the places_, but usually not _events_ themselves.
For things that affect people, I think the impact of the recency axis is significantly larger than the one of the geographical axis. e.g. I feel the effects of the Iran war in my daily consumer prices in my daily life. I don't feel the effects of a famous person being born two doors down from my place 200 years ago in my daily live.
Of course highly local things, like e.g. local politics are also felt, but those are also barely reflected in Wikipedia articles.
Mhh i wonder how this would have evolved, since, you know, for 99.99% of time, humans didn't really get any information other than from their immediate proximity. And if they did (e.g. earthquake), it was very much relevant and should affect them.
I'm at least a tiny bit less ignorant on biology than psychology. I don't think this is the kind of thing that does evolve.
Normally more general capacities than that evolve. We've evolved the ability to learn and adapt, and that's what we're using to create these heuristics. But I don't people evolve into individual beliefs/attitudes in that way.
I mean, it's the brain, not the world around it. Our brains haven't really evolved much while civilization and technology have been growthmaxxing. Same reason why certain social media posts can trigger a physical, emotional reaction, even though for 99.99% of the time there were no cellphones or social media.
I think¹ it is more likely just a function of how we judge danger. Something local could be relevant to us now (if it were ongoing, or was likely to occur again, or affects/affected someone we care about), something far away might be relevant to us later. Nearby or approaching animal sounds? Definitely pay attention. More distant animal sounds? Maybe keep an ear on that. A tale of animal sounds in the next valley? Only take much note if it is part of an otherwise interesting/entertaining story.
--------
[1] caveat: I am in no way a biologist, sociologist, nor psychiatrist - this pondering may be complete bunkum
It was a really strange feeling to read through Asimov and get to Robots and Empire, where the story, having ranged throughout a galactic empire in the far-flung future, follows the characters not just to Earth but to Three Mile Island — a place I had seen before! A place less than an hour a way from my hometown! It made the story feel more connected to my own life in a way that I was not expecting.
Anecdotal: I felt much more connected to Kurt Vonnegut's writing knowing that I had walked the same streets as him. The cultural aspects of his characters hit differently being able to match it to people I had met in similar places, albeit at different times.
Definitely. I read a few articles top to bottom that I normally wouldn't have even bothered to look up on real Wikipedia, learned some cool local lore.
I don't think it is quite banal. The focus is on distance,
with distance being local. There is IMO nothing banal about
that. And the article linked in is minimal rather than banal.
(Also good thing you did not forget the 'b' there.)
You can of course assume everything to have a manipulative focus, but I don't see it here.
This is a great idea but I'd definitely make the distance configurable. Where I am right now would need several hours walking to reach anywhere Wikipedia worthy but if I expanded to say a 15km circle there's probably a couple of places of interest.
Meanwhile if someone lives in a city they'll get loads of results.
EDIT: actually this is just a wrapper around wikipedia's nearby feature I think. I tried a couple of places and they give identical results.
> EDIT: actually this is just a wrapper around wikipedia's nearby feature I think.
It does at least add a useful feature: being able to state a location to search from. The Wikipedia page (unless there is one other than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby that is more flexible) will only work off your current location, which is completely turned off on my work machine. Also upon checking on my phone, even with “desktop site” forced, the map looks to be an additional feasure too.
> The Wikipedia page [...] will only work off your current location
You can put the coordinates of any location in the URL. One way to get that is in google maps, when you right click and click on the coordinates. Paste it where the coordinates go in the URL and remove the space after the comma.
It appears to limit itself to 50 results though, which only got me results up to 930 m away from the location I picked near me.
Disclaimer: I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, albeit in the infrastructure rather than in development / product.
I like this feature a lot, but I do not know how it is implemented and whether it would be possible to have users change the range. Maybe it is hardcoded for some performance reason, I have honestly no clue. But I am giving below a few paths that could help one eventually improve the system.
Do note I am not in the development / product side and I have no view about their backlog or whether they have the bandwidth to review such an incoming review request or a patch.
That extension exposes a public API that allows setting any search radius up to 10 km ( https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query... ), so presumably there's no barrier to making the search radius smaller, but maybe there'd be performance issues if you allowed making it larger.
(NearbyPages just embeds a Vue app into the page that makes a client-side fetch() call to invoke that API with a hard-coded radius.)
When you change the language you are essentially moving to a different Wikipedia site, so yes it does - it pulls the results from the local site you are on.
Hmm, I see metric distances (kilometers). Accessing from Germany. It's still using the English Wikipedia though, not the German one (which I think would have more local content).
PS: there's a side bar link to switch between miles and km, I might have pressed that (was expecting to see some sort of distance map though instead of switching between 'imperial' and 'modern' ;)
I rarely see yards used in the united states outside of football and other sports. Usually, distances to travel will go as feet, then right into miles. I can't think of many people who wouldn't say "quarter mile" over "440 yards". Anything less than that is in feet. Buildings and structures are measured in square feet, our long tape measures are usually labeled "300 feet" and not "100 yard", and in land surveying, measurements are often done in (decimal) feet.
One place I do come across yards is in "a yard of dirt" (or mulch, sand, concrete, etc) where it means cubic yard.
Because to convert from one to t'other, you have to multiply by 22 x 10 x 8 or whatever it is, rather than simply shift the digits.
For example, there's a park that's 1 mi 180 yds from me - if you were to pick one and stick with it then you could say either 1.1 mis or 1940 yds, rather than mixing the two and expecting people to do multiple rounds of arithmetic.
Could that be a UK thing? I wouldn't know tbh, because between mixing yards and miles versus sticking to imperial units in the 21st century, the latter is definitely crazier ;)
In Canada we have imperial for short measurements (inches and feet for lumber, people's heights) but metric for longer distances (kilometers for driving distances for example)
Which I never used because it requires permission to see my location, and at home, my ISP gives a location far from where I live anyway. So even if I allowed it, it would be meaningless.
So, unless there is some way to manually enter a town name or ZIP code that I missed, the feature is unusable, which is a shame.
You can go to any article with location data, click the coordinates to go to the geohack page with links to all kinds of data about that location, which includes a link to "List of nearby articles" which takes you back to wikipedia's nearby search for that location. So from the White House page:
Speaking of: All the OP link does is pull articles from Wikipedia. Am I in a minority in not seeing the point? When I read the title I expected it to be a site for locals to share their knowledge, that would have been really cool. It's strangers who'd benefit most from local knowledge, people generally know their homes and what's around them. It also didn't even work when I tried it and showed articles that were over 100 miles off the location I input.
This was much cooler than I expected. It doesn't seem to be accurate with regard to the "half hour walk" but it still paints a nice radius. I'm in a fairly rural area, so I didn't expect to find much of anything, but it's got local parks and trails as well as churches and landmarks. It's a short list; there's just not much around us, but this seems like a cool resource
This is super cool! Just punched in my zip code, and hit "random article" three times, and came up with three weird stories I didn't know about the history of places within a few blocks of me in Portland, Oregon. What an awesome idea for travelers!
Ordinary houses are the gap for me. Most of the history within a half hour walk isn't notable enough for Wikipedia: who built a place, when the porch was added, what got covered up behind the plaster in the 1950s. That record usually lives in the heads of whoever worked on the house and disappears with them. A walkable map seems like a natural place to start collecting it.
Really cool idea but not ideal for tourists. I just tried where I live and it mostly gave me a list of housing developments and roads. Nothing actually interesting, and there definitely are interesting things!
There is also the Wikimedia project Wikivoyage[1], which focusses exclusively on travel guides. I just recently learned about it but haven’t actually used it yet, so I don’t know if it is any good.
Great project. Also nice that they are using photon for their address search.
I might be pendantic here (for reasons you find in my profile), but this isnt a "half hour walk" and it is just a 3 km radius around the location, i.e. as the crow flies and rivers or walls are ignored. A real half hour walk would be an isochrone for a walking profile ;)
That's a nice idea, but doesn't it solve a “problem” that doesn't really need a solution in the first place, or? Wouldn't it make more sense to be able to filter by categories, such as day trip destinations, family, etc.?
This is so cool! Looking at my own city, most of the points of interest are public buildings; somehow the fact that its MY fire department building makes it relevant to me. Otherwise I'd probably never read an article about the history of a random fire department building. A few other commenters have mentioned that information feels more interesting when its physically close to you, I agree.
I had an idea a while back to gather audio recordings of people telling stories of their adventures in my area (Alaska) and placing them on a map, with the arbitrary restriction that you have to physically go to the place the story happened to unlock it. It works, and I think its pretty cool, but also found it takes a TON of time meeting with people, recording, cleaning up the audio... after about 100 stories I slowed down on the project. But if anyone here lives in Alaska, you can listen to these stories (mobile app only) for free at https://loremaps.io/app. Someday I hope to get back to it.
I live somewhere pretty remote, and every article it suggests is an entry for a nearby village, which is usually a sentence long. There are other interesting things nearby: could it have some kind of variance function, so it looks specifically for a variety of content?
Here I am, seeing something cool and immediately asking for changes. Spirit of the internet ;) Genuinely, it is a wonderful idea, and I admire the concept and that you did it.
Very similar, except I live in a very large city... but it's not an anglophile 1st world country, so tr list is full of streets and unis and roads. "Hey do you know your <location> features <location station>!?" lol
It doesn't work very well, in my experience. I have entered my hometown, which happens to have a Wikipedia entry. Local Wikipedia listed nearby entries, but omitted the Wikipedia page of the town itself, alongside other Wikipedia entries related to the same place. So, I tried looking up a nearby town, and see whether the pages related to my hometown would eventually show up, but they didn't. The pages involved have the coordinates populated.
Omg I love this so much mate! Incredible how much more relevant nearby articles feel than the default to which you have no personal connection. I also think local news are much better/useful for the same reason.
I'm working on something similar! Open World, an app that turns collecting nearby Wikipedia places into a game! [1]
It started with you having to go to the place IRL to unlock the article/story, mostly so you find cool spots out on a walk. But slowly I discovered that most people go on walks somewhat rarely, so now it also includes a virtual Fast-Travel system using Apple Maps LookAround :)
Oh, also a 3D map of the different neighbourhoods of a city to unlock one a time, plus narrative Quests to complete with the secrets you found, ...
Yes!!
And with today's translation programs, the user does not even need to understand the local language.
Better — for me — would even be a mix of languages. Give me the most and longest articles of all languages for the places around.
Recently my friend paid attention to a statue of a man near his apartment he had passed for years. The story is behind this person is worthy of a movie, he’s like a character in a Pynchon novel:
I used this during my walk around around Tirana, Albania this morning where I'm traveling right now. I learned some interesting history about the neighborhood I'm staying in. Also discovered some museums and buildings nearby that I'd like to check out now.
When I visit a new city I usually spend time poking around Google Maps to discover points of interest nearby, but this will be another useful resource. Thanks!
Wikivoyage is a useful alternative to those expensive Lonely Planet books, though they got a little manic about having each district of a city have it's own page in some smaller areas.
Related: OsmAnd has support for wikipedia-sourced points for the local offline maps. Not sure about the details though. Only related thing I found for an explanation is "Geospatial Wikidata Dataset", which is suspiciously fresh.
It's cool, but I think this should be extended beyond landmarks. It would be fun to have people that lived in the area or that are connected to that area for some reason
A note, I found that many of the descriptions in "Did you know" include the place name. That is to say, I saw many many descriptions with the phrase "located in $CITY, $STATE, United States".
As all points are within a small radius, these description are very redundant.
A lot of popular websites like to throw snarky error pages at you which some people find annoying. But I actually DO want to see this site give you snarky pages if it finds zero normal articles within x distance.
I've got one article near me. There's another group of articles that, I guess, are a bit further off? One of them reads like an ad for a creepy park. Luckily, the actual walking time is more like 24 hours. Yay rural Texas?
Filtering is all nice, but for a truly local wiki you should get different relevance criteria and different licensing criteria, to be able to negotiate citing local more recent sources.
This is a really cool idea but my entire city is mostly articles for regional districts and schools. I also found an article on the casino and the refinery on the edge of town.
Related: You can also check geotagged Wikipedia pages on a map: https://wiki-map.com/
A fun way to find articles nearby that need photographs is Wikishootme - https://wikishootme.toolforge.org/ (although it seems to be offline at the moment).
Cool idea! I had lots of fun looking at stuff nearby.
Right now it seems that it simply removes links for stuff without a geotag that's nearby. But many articles are in fact nearby and are simply missing geotags, or perhaps encompass a slightly larger area where only a part of it is close by. Also, all the pictures don't have working links so I can't click on a picture to make it bigger.
most of the things within a half-hour walk from us are actually banned on wikipedia because they're not notable enough.. i was expecting this site to let us freely add "those forbidden" things. i had high hopes when reading the title alone..
turns out, it just filters existing wikipedia articles based on their proximity to a given coordinate.
English version only. Tried a few towns in Europe, and it's missing a lot of what the local language Wikipedia offers, so it's useful, in large part, probably for the anglophone world only.
Of note, something similar exists in OSMAnd~. You can download wikipedia articles for areas you downloaded. It's very useful when you visit a place IMO
Looking at articles about the surrounding area while being a passenger is a great way to discover future destinations, and to just learn what's out there. OSMAnd makes this really easy by toggling the Wikipedia overlay.
Yes, but coverage outside the US is surprisingly sparse. Many European countries (Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Greece…) have fewer than 20 points of interest each.
Because hosting with some other entity is not what you want for a regional focus where you want to set your own relevance criteria and licensing agreements ideally.
Germany and Austria have quite a bit of local Wikis with more than 20 active editors.
Usually as some entity adjacent to the cities archive or run by some local foundation.
Pretty cool! Here in Menlo Park, they call out Kepler's Books, which most people would know about, but also the first Round Table Pizza which I think few people know about.
Great idea. Similarly, the only reason I keep OsmAnd installed is that I can add a layer of "Wikipedia articles" -- a fun way to kill time when I'm backpacking and want to explore something outside the influence-o-sphere.
Now getting this info as easily navigable webpages is amazing.
I see it's capped to 500 articles, because the first two zip codes i tried were the middle of manhattan and the middle of sf, and i was curious just how many wikipedia articles these two epicenters have.
I imagine it would be sooo cool... but for me, living in the proverbial middle of nowhere, far away from cities and tourist attractions, there isn't really that much to do or read, unfortunately.^^
The concept is cool but in practice Wikipedia with just a bunch of buildings is not that interesting. Surely there are more than ~300 noteworthy articles for a dense NYC zip code.
Doesn't the Wikipedia iOS app already have a feature exactly like this and every map solution that's posted in this comment section? Do they add anything?
To me this exposes the extreme limitations Wikipedia has given itself. My location could have 10 times as many Wikipedia articles nearby about things that are interesting, unique, or historically relevant. But those articles would all get denied.
I consider this to be far more progress for humanity than landing on moon or sending a spaceship to outside of solar system. That's because this move is in the right direction, while others are not. As a human, you need to first master your habitat around you, before getting excited or concerned about things that happen in another country thousands of miles away.
Some of the Did you know entries are unintentionally quite funny:
> ... that 7 Eccles Street was a row house in Dublin, Ireland?
I mean, as the name, and the fact that it is a _row house_ (though, also, it's weird that the article, and I checked, it's like that in the real Wikipedia too, calls it that; they're usually called terraced houses here), indicates that, well, there were a few of them. It's actually notable because it's where Leopold Bloom lives in Ulysses.
This is a really fun idea, but I went from excited to disgusted in the span of one click.
The first thing that pops up for my city of Malmö is the school stabbing that happened in 2022. They're so rare here, and yet Wikipedia felt I just had to see it.
I'm not going to make stupid feature requests, but it would be cool with a filter for types of Wikipedia articles to show.
I made a map of Wikipedia pages and events once [1] and a key decision was: which pages to show first, and which to show only when the user zooms in?
I went with "let's show pages with the most words first". If people spent more time writing a page, it must be a great topic, right? Unfortunately, this also surfaces all the wars, crimes, accidents and controversies that generated the most coverage. These are the most active pages on Wikipedia.
A mile is supposed to be (1 / 60 / 360 / Earth.circumferenceOf()), so a 1.5mi radius or 3mi diameter circle is (supposed to be slightly short of) 3/60 or 0.05 degrees on a map.
A yard is just 10% short of a meter, just the same thing for most practical purposes.
Metric rules and imperial drools, I agree, but I reckon if we put our minds to it we can multiply by 0.9 and 1.6 (or 0.91 and 1.61 if you are genius). Keeps the mind sharp in this age of outsourced thinking!
It's an interesting idea. Personally I prefer information to not
be restricted, but for those who are, for instance, not very mobile,
having Wikipedia as a focus nearby, kind of makes sense. I am not sure
how useful Wikipedia is, as a lot of information may be missing locally
or not be up to date, but given how utter crap Google search is these
days, any move towards improvements (including local things) is good.
The internet was being ruined by the big corporations ruining the web
for many years - it is time to fight back.
Wow this is surprisingly useful to explore local data, thanks for building!!
I wonder: why are you calculating PageRank, are the wiki article views not enough?
If I play around with the importance slider, PageRank seems to have much less difference between articles, highlighting just a few articles per city in large text.
Oh, yes. It also includes all Wikidata entries with geocoordinates, but they have the lowest "importance" and are only shown very small.
You need to zoom out a bit to see places with articles.
Having an encyclopedia entirely sourced in an LLM that is easily manipulated and prone to "hallucination" doesn't seem like a great idea, that's why not.
I was very skeptical of the idea of a bot encyclopedia myself, but after looking up a few random articles and comparing them with human-authored encyclopedias, I can't say it's worse. One of the articles was actually substantially less biased than the Wikipedia version.
The LLM sources from the same reliable sources as Wikipedia (including Wikipedia itself). Wikipedia is arguably easier manipulated and known to be heavily astroturfed by governments, corporations and political activists. To manipulate Grokipedia you'd have to either hack xAI, which would almost certainly be discovered, or rewrite all its sources.
https://chattymaps.com/collections
There isn't enough content to showcase on the map right now but I'll work on that. Give it another go in a couple of weeks or so.
As it stands I think you will have a hard time getting people to start filling your database.
I'm quite into paddle boarding at the moment and in the UK there are a lot of good places to launch from that are not well known so that would be a good niche to start with.
You live in an area rich with history stretching back 35 - 50 thousand years
Wonder if this is related to the biological phenomena of humans tending to care more about humans who resemble themselves than those who don't (homophily)
[0] Not that my expectation has any weight, I have close to zero knowledge of psychology.
For things that affect people, I think the impact of the recency axis is significantly larger than the one of the geographical axis. e.g. I feel the effects of the Iran war in my daily consumer prices in my daily life. I don't feel the effects of a famous person being born two doors down from my place 200 years ago in my daily live.
Of course highly local things, like e.g. local politics are also felt, but those are also barely reflected in Wikipedia articles.
Just flaunting my ignorance of biology here.
Normally more general capacities than that evolve. We've evolved the ability to learn and adapt, and that's what we're using to create these heuristics. But I don't people evolve into individual beliefs/attitudes in that way.
--------
[1] caveat: I am in no way a biologist, sociologist, nor psychiatrist - this pondering may be complete bunkum
"A plane crash in <other country> killed all passengers, including 2 from <our country>" is a fairly common news styling.
I don't think it is quite banal. The focus is on distance, with distance being local. There is IMO nothing banal about that. And the article linked in is minimal rather than banal. (Also good thing you did not forget the 'b' there.)
You can of course assume everything to have a manipulative focus, but I don't see it here.
Meanwhile if someone lives in a city they'll get loads of results.
EDIT: actually this is just a wrapper around wikipedia's nearby feature I think. I tried a couple of places and they give identical results.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby#/coord/15.90721...
It does at least add a useful feature: being able to state a location to search from. The Wikipedia page (unless there is one other than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby that is more flexible) will only work off your current location, which is completely turned off on my work machine. Also upon checking on my phone, even with “desktop site” forced, the map looks to be an additional feasure too.
You can put the coordinates of any location in the URL. One way to get that is in google maps, when you right click and click on the coordinates. Paste it where the coordinates go in the URL and remove the space after the comma.
It appears to limit itself to 50 results though, which only got me results up to 930 m away from the location I picked near me.
I like this feature a lot, but I do not know how it is implemented and whether it would be possible to have users change the range. Maybe it is hardcoded for some performance reason, I have honestly no clue. But I am giving below a few paths that could help one eventually improve the system.
The page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby is powered by the MediaWiki extension https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:NearbyPages .
The source code is https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/mediawiki/extensions/NearbyPa... (GitHub mirror https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-NearbyPage... ).
Issues/bugs are tracked at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/nearbypages/ , it is possible a similar request already exists there.
Do note I am not in the development / product side and I have no view about their backlog or whether they have the bandwidth to review such an incoming review request or a patch.
That extension exposes a public API that allows setting any search radius up to 10 km ( https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query... ), so presumably there's no barrier to making the search radius smaller, but maybe there'd be performance issues if you allowed making it larger.
(NearbyPages just embeds a Vue app into the page that makes a client-side fetch() call to invoke that API with a hard-coded radius.)
Now I'm not sure if switching the language pulls in more results or just changes the article language...
Oh, it doesn't try to fall back to geofencing, hmm?
PS: there's a side bar link to switch between miles and km, I might have pressed that (was expecting to see some sort of distance map though instead of switching between 'imperial' and 'modern' ;)
One place I do come across yards is in "a yard of dirt" (or mulch, sand, concrete, etc) where it means cubic yard.
For example, there's a park that's 1 mi 180 yds from me - if you were to pick one and stick with it then you could say either 1.1 mis or 1940 yds, rather than mixing the two and expecting people to do multiple rounds of arithmetic.
FTFY. I live in Japan and it also shows me the distance in yards and miles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby
So, unless there is some way to manually enter a town name or ZIP code that I missed, the feature is unusable, which is a shame.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby#/coord/52.52000...
Change the lat long to any you want, and change "en." to other language codes to search a different (language) encyclopedia.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House ->
2. https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=White_Hou... ->
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby#/coord/38.89777...
A healthy mistrust.
It's bizare how many people give their coodinates to any random website that asks for them.
https://www.location-guard.com/
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/change-geolocation-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Ell_Persons
[1] https://www.wikivoyage.org
Then post on location specific subreddits. Folks will eat this up.
It's cool, but a bit sad, to discover establishments that used to exist nearby but don't any longer. It's not easy to do that otherwise.
Had some meaningful conversations at the Cafe (which I assume finally closed as well). I never liked the Starbucks across the street.
Because of earthquakes maybe?
I might be pendantic here (for reasons you find in my profile), but this isnt a "half hour walk" and it is just a 3 km radius around the location, i.e. as the crow flies and rivers or walls are ignored. A real half hour walk would be an isochrone for a walking profile ;)
I had an idea a while back to gather audio recordings of people telling stories of their adventures in my area (Alaska) and placing them on a map, with the arbitrary restriction that you have to physically go to the place the story happened to unlock it. It works, and I think its pretty cool, but also found it takes a TON of time meeting with people, recording, cleaning up the audio... after about 100 stories I slowed down on the project. But if anyone here lives in Alaska, you can listen to these stories (mobile app only) for free at https://loremaps.io/app. Someday I hope to get back to it.
You can let it pick your own location, and if you rewrite the language prefix at the beginning of the url, you get that language's version. [2][3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby#/coord/15.90721...
[2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby#/coord/15.90721...
[3] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby#/coord/15.90721...
I live somewhere pretty remote, and every article it suggests is an entry for a nearby village, which is usually a sentence long. There are other interesting things nearby: could it have some kind of variance function, so it looks specifically for a variety of content?
Here I am, seeing something cool and immediately asking for changes. Spirit of the internet ;) Genuinely, it is a wonderful idea, and I admire the concept and that you did it.
I'm working on something similar! Open World, an app that turns collecting nearby Wikipedia places into a game! [1]
It started with you having to go to the place IRL to unlock the article/story, mostly so you find cool spots out on a walk. But slowly I discovered that most people go on walks somewhat rarely, so now it also includes a virtual Fast-Travel system using Apple Maps LookAround :)
Oh, also a 3D map of the different neighbourhoods of a city to unlock one a time, plus narrative Quests to complete with the secrets you found, ...
Local History is fun!!
[1] https://openworldapp.xyz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Houghton
https://youtu.be/0MWnSKDsURg
When I visit a new city I usually spend time poking around Google Maps to discover points of interest nearby, but this will be another useful resource. Thanks!
Speed to load, the specific use case I want which is just to load up near me and see a performant map I can browse.
The other links were either projects, games, or apps that did the same with older map projections that performed poorly for me.
https://wikinewsie.toolforge.org/en/portal/california
https://wikinewsie.toolforge.org/en/portal/europe
https://tamper.io/inquire/
As all points are within a small radius, these description are very redundant.
From today's featured article:
Dirt
Nearest to you:
Missing sock
Wilson the volleyball
Gut microbiome
Depression
Ants
Overdue bill
Serial killer
https://edjefferson.com/localwiki/?w=Fairlight%2C_New_South_...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkiYy0i8FtA
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regiowiki
Filtering is all nice, but for a truly local wiki you should get different relevance criteria and different licensing criteria, to be able to negotiate citing local more recent sources.
A fun way to find articles nearby that need photographs is Wikishootme - https://wikishootme.toolforge.org/ (although it seems to be offline at the moment).
Right now it seems that it simply removes links for stuff without a geotag that's nearby. But many articles are in fact nearby and are simply missing geotags, or perhaps encompass a slightly larger area where only a part of it is close by. Also, all the pictures don't have working links so I can't click on a picture to make it bigger.
turns out, it just filters existing wikipedia articles based on their proximity to a given coordinate.
Been around over 20 years
Germany and Austria have quite a bit of local Wikis with more than 20 active editors. Usually as some entity adjacent to the cities archive or run by some local foundation.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regiowiki#Deutschsprachige_Reg...
Now getting this info as easily navigable webpages is amazing.
Interesting failure mode, but I like the concept overall.
(although I guess the German Wikipedia would have a bit more content than the English Wikipedia used here)
Found an abbey around my place in Western Bavaria I didn't know existed
I discovered something rightout near me that I wasnt aware of!:)
(It could be fun to have an AI populate the db)
> ... that 7 Eccles Street was a row house in Dublin, Ireland?
I mean, as the name, and the fact that it is a _row house_ (though, also, it's weird that the article, and I checked, it's like that in the real Wikipedia too, calls it that; they're usually called terraced houses here), indicates that, well, there were a few of them. It's actually notable because it's where Leopold Bloom lives in Ulysses.
Edit: others have pointed out https://wiki-map.com/, which is way better.
should probably use local language wikipedia? english is rather bare-bones for my area
> 0.8 miles
Ok great I thought that I can walk...
however, it is actually 1.9 miles when walking according to Google Maps and the path lacks sidewalks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby
... that A is a commune in the X department in western France?
... that B is a commune in the X department in western France?
... that C is a commune in the X department in western France?
... that D is a commune in the X department in western France?
... that E is a commune in the X department in western France?
... that F is a commune in the X department in western France?
Yes, I knew. They're all nearby communes. If I go in any direction, I can't miss them.
The first thing that pops up for my city of Malmö is the school stabbing that happened in 2022. They're so rare here, and yet Wikipedia felt I just had to see it.
I'm not going to make stupid feature requests, but it would be cool with a filter for types of Wikipedia articles to show.
I went with "let's show pages with the most words first". If people spent more time writing a page, it must be a great topic, right? Unfortunately, this also surfaces all the wars, crimes, accidents and controversies that generated the most coverage. These are the most active pages on Wikipedia.
[1] https://landnotes.org/?location=u0q9wgry-5&paneTab=about
A yard is just 10% short of a meter, just the same thing for most practical purposes.
(full disclosure: I did look these up)
Has local language too.
It shows all Wikipedia articles on a zoomable map. The size of the labels depends on its pagerank score and the pageview statistics.
I wonder: why are you calculating PageRank, are the wiki article views not enough?
If I play around with the importance slider, PageRank seems to have much less difference between articles, highlighting just a few articles per city in large text.
And because of bot traffic, the pageview statistics are sometimes suspicious and noisy.
https://grokipedia.com
The LLM sources from the same reliable sources as Wikipedia (including Wikipedia itself). Wikipedia is arguably easier manipulated and known to be heavily astroturfed by governments, corporations and political activists. To manipulate Grokipedia you'd have to either hack xAI, which would almost certainly be discovered, or rewrite all its sources.