OsmAnd has this feature built-in (and offline). This is how I travel; sometimes walking around in a city, "oh, nice building/park/statue/etc, what is this?" and in no seconds I read the intro of its Wikipedia article, if interested, can open the whole article.
Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia
81–90 of 108 posts
Re: Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, ...? (If you want language-independence, there's Wikidata.)
I think you misunderstood me
I mean, what are the "local" Wikipedias that would improve the coverage in the countries I listed?
Re: Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia
#83OsmAnd has this feature built-in (and offline). This is how I travel; sometimes walking around in a city, "oh, nice building/park/statue/etc, what is this?" and in no seconds I read the intro of its Wikipedia article, if interested, can open the whole article.
Looks like a paid feature. When I downloaded OsmAnd on iOS and tried to enable Wikipedia markers, I saw a prompt to purchase a monthly subscription.
Re: Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia
#84My 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 l…
This is great. I remember thinking something like this would spice up travelling.
Re: Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia
#85I'm working on a driving audio-guide version of this called ExploreHere | Stories (iOS). We pull data together from a variety of sources and generate a story based on your location and read it aloud using high quality audio. https://explorehere.app We're in beta, but if anyones interested in testing it out, here's a link to join our testflight beta program! https://testflight.apple.com/join/ExaAqkU8
Cool stuff! I was thinking of doing the same, do you have a beta version for android too?
Re: Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you misunderstood me
I mean, what are the "local" Wikipedias that would improve the coverage in the countries I listed?
I'm still unsure what you're getting at. But what I suspect: if there is no local wikipedia version (e.g. the German wiki for Germany), then you possibly can't increase the number of data points, can't you? All depends on there being a Wikipedia in the first place.
Re: Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia
#87Very 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…
There are also just too many entries in dense areas. It's impossible to go through all of them for something that might be interesting for the reader specifically.
It would be nice if they could be categorized/color-coded by some type (nature/monument/establishment/etc...) on the map so people can sift through them more easily.
Re: Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia
#88Love it. One comment: I wish it didn't zoom in when I click a map pin. I prefer the map to stay in the same position.
Also: the difference between zoom levels is waaay too high. E.g. it jumps from showing too much to showing too little in a single zoom.
Re: Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia
#89Great concept. Things I'd like to see: 1. Some way of knowing which Wikipedia articles are more interesting than others. All the pins are the same, so I don't know which to click on. 2. Hover to preview the title of a pin, to save me clicking on each, one by one. 3. It would be nice if the map didn't change zoom level when clicking on a pin. It's a very fun site overall, hope you keep working on it.
I agree, some kind of ranking would be helpful (length of Wikipedia article?)
Or/and number of articles that link to it, number of languages, frequency of updates?
Re: Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean, what are the "local" Wikipedias that would improve the coverage in the countries I listed?
I'm still unsure what you're getting at. But what I suspect: if there is no local wikipedia version (e.g. the German wiki for Germany), then you possibly can't increase the number of data points, can't you? All depends on there being a Wikipedia in the first place.
I suppose I didn't (and still don't) understand why you singled out US and GB. Here's my take of the topic:
1. Wikipedia editions are not defined by region but by language, and the relationship between regions and languages is many-to-many. English is spoken (as a dominant language) in US/UK/CA/IE/AU/IN/... among others and German is spoken in DE/AT/CH/IT/... among others.
2. English is one of the language editions. The edition is special mainly in that it has the most diverse regional coverage.
3. All editions have an uneven regional coverage dependent of the speakers' distribution but also population density, literacy, social economics etc.
4. There is overlap between language editions so it's unclear whether given two their union would improve coverage and how.
5. Wikidata is the language-independent knowledge graph that includes the sum of the article metadata regarding all the Wikipedia editions (and more).
Now, a global map of Wikipedia articles in English is useful in its own right if you want to see what you can read in English. To improve the coverage, you would write articles about more topics in English.
However, if you wanted to see more dots on the map, you could base it on Wikidata to include all articles on all editions, or to include all Wikidata items even with no corresponding Wikipedia articles.
Whereas, if you wanted to see what you can read in German, you would need a map that includes the German articles and excludes the English articles.
And if you know multiple languages, you might want to see the union of those languages.
I start to think you may have in mind people who speak two languages: English and a regionally dominant language. If they wanted to see which articles they can read about the region, they could use a map of those two languages. If those two Wikipedia editions were significantly complementary, it would be a significant improvement in coverage for them.
Still, I'm unsure why to single out US/GB when there are other countries where English is the majority (or practically the only) language, there are other countries where the coverage in English is already fine, US/GB also have minority languages that could potentially improve their coverage etc.