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!
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.
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.
Check out what esperent wrote in another comment[1].
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Distances measured in yards for European destinations is an insult
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!
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby#/coord/15.90721...
Like others, I agree this is very cool.
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.
Awesome, I found that possibly the first bookstore cafe was in Palo Alto on Cal Ave! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printers_Inc._Bookstore
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.
Super cool idea! Would love support for other languages, as English Wikipedia is quite limited where I live.
+1 from me one but even with 'just' english I was surprised at the amount and quality of stuff in my area.
Check out what esperent wrote in another comment[1]. 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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby#/coord/15.90721...
same!
Very cool idea. Would be even better if it had an option to use a local language.
This is the World Wide Web I want to see. Amazing job. Thank you!
Vey nicely done! One issue though, not many local articles in english here. I see no obvious way to change language?
Is it possible to change the language of Wikipedia? For many places, the local language Wikipedia has more articles.
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.
Content that is curated by interested humans, without commercial interests, is so good.
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.
I found out that a closed church I walk past regularly was called "St Chad's"
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.
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.
Wikipedia has a nearby feature that works in other languages as well
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby
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.
There is: the link format is
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.
location can be set through browser add-ons or devtools/about:config
https://www.location-guard.com/
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/change-geolocation-...
This is so cool, although I would like a feature to filter by subtopic or what the structures are used for (e.g. churches, bridges, museums).
I guess it works but I have no idea what a yard or a mile is.
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!
Very cool. Obvious in hindsight with every location having coordinates.
Found an abbey around my place in Western Bavaria I didn't know existed
I love it. It would also be nice to be able to a) enter desired distance, and b) choose the metric system.
c) select the Wikipedia language. There are some English Wikipedia articles for my region, but my local language Wikipedia has much more
thanks a lot, +1 für b).
Very nice! It really should have a field to enter the radius of the search.
This took too long to make.
https://wiki-map.com/ considered much better.
Has local language too.
Osmand for android also embeds results on the map, as an optional layer.