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Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia

en.nearbywiki.org

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Re: Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia

#11

Post by bbor »

I love this so much, I’ve wanted this for SO long - thank you. I often am traveling between major cities and think “you know, I bet there’s a lot of interesting history and ecology right here. I bet some people would come from far and wide to be right here. I wish I knew a local who could tell me about it…”

If anyone wants to steal my million dollar startup idea, please credit my HN username in your IPO announcement: we need an app that integrates simple itinerary creation (airbnb/tripadvisor/google-sheets), itinerary management (tripit), restaurant selection (yelp), expense tracking (Splitwise), and this (ad-hoc location-based information of a vaguely “historical” or “informative” nature). Of course all with a sprinkling of LLM-magic on top for UX niceties.

So one app could connect a group over the course of a trip, helping them plan it both in advance and in the moment. Call it… _The Worldbook_.

Re: Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia

#12

Post by alexey-salmin »

Very nice idea but useless in Paris. Dots are grouped too aggressively and don't have captions. Need to ungroup and click on each, gave up after checking 20 metro stations and landmarks I already know. Filters are unreadable and puzzling like "Pages including reco...", just wiki categories apparently. Can filter for metro stations but can't filter them out.

It's barely working and have 1k downloads but already shows ads in my face.

Re: Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia

#13

Post by gigel82 »

Idea is interesting, but zooming in every time you click on something is very unintuitive; if this is for "exploration" it should keep the zoom level while you click on things.

Also a direct link to Wikipedia would be nice instead of the full page preview (perhaps this was designed for mobile, I'm describing the desktop experience).

Re: Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia

#14

Post by jcrawfordor »

My husband built https://wikimap.wiki which shows every geotagged Wikipedia article on a map at once. It was actually quite complex to do this because of the large number of articles. The UI makes some compromises to try to keep it usable but it's a tough nut to crack with the highly variable density. It also has filtering by category and some features of that nature.

The major trick is that the article icons are a layer of prerendered tiles; the client can't handle that many objects. Clicking does a request to a geojson server backed by postgis to find what's in the region you clicked. I'm not sure that it's actually updating right now either, ingesting updates takes hours and is pretty brittle because of issues with the format of the dumps Wikipedia provides.

Re: Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia

#16

Post by pimlottc »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #12

Very nice idea but useless in Paris. Dots are grouped too aggressively and don't have captions. Need to ungroup and click on each, gave up after checking 20 metro stations and landmarks I already know. Filters are unreadable and puzzling like "Pages including reco...", just wiki categories apparently. Can filter for metro stations but can't filter them out. It's barely working and have 1k downloads but already shows…

I agree, dots should only be combined when they are actually overlapping by a significant amount. Otherwise you’re just hiding information in a frustrating way.

Re: Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia

#18

Post by colechristensen »

Loughla wrote: post #10

So this must only work in urban/metro areas. In my rural area, it's just a map of incorporated townships, and I know there are historical things in this area that are on wikipedia.

In my metro area it's mostly just articles about specific buildings which is interesting if you're a building nerd, not so much if you're not. On an imaginary notability scale, they'd all be on the bottom rung meeting just the minimum to be included in Wikipedia.

Next steps on this kind of thing would be to classify the nearby items and then give them a score for how interesting they were.

For example, one of the items:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7th-8th_Street_&_Nicollet_stat...

This is a bus station. I have no idea why a bus station meets the qualifications to be included in Wikipedia in the first place, but it's definitely not an "interesting place nearby".

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