(edjefferson.com)
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.
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[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.
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-...
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!!
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.
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://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!:)
> ... 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.
(It could be fun to have an AI populate the db)
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.
... 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.
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.