Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia | Hacker News Reader

Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia

en.nearbywiki.org

377 pointsudev4096103 comments

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.

This is really cool. The thing that strikes me immediately is all of the shipwrecks.

It mistakingly incorporates coordinates from other planets/satelites in our solar system. Seems a large fraction of those point nemo locations are meteorite impacts on nearby satelites.

When looking through shipwrecks I found a mexican school https://wikimap.wiki/?base=map&lat=-5630577.9494&lon=2565608...

This is impressive. Very cool.

Poking around a bit, I noticed that some of the geotagged articles are from other planets. For example, north of Alaska are a bunch of craters from Mercury. Makes me think that an interesting feature could be choosing which planet to render the map from :)

Unfortunately I don't think there's any structured way to determine which planet an article applies to. Broadly speaking, Wikipedia geotagging is inconsistent and the data quality is fairly poor. I think a lot of that is because it's surprisingly difficult to make a viewer like this, so few people have. That makes the data quality issues nonobvious.

Wikidata offers the promise of more structured data, but I know my husband experimented with it and decided not to use it. I think the problem was that mapping Wikidata objects to Wikipedia articles was too difficult (there is a structured way to do this but in practice very few articles have the annotation).

The globe: parameter should give you the information you need: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Coord#globe:G for full documentation on this.

That is a really cool method I would have never thought of. Did he have a lot of experience with this type of thing?

That's great! And, unlike nearbywiki.org, it correctly places the wiki articles (nearbywiki seems to be off by hundreds of meters for some entries).

Awesome! But it should probably include local wikipedias as well, as it's pretty thin outside the US/GB

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?

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.

>why you singled out US and GB

let's take him at his word, "it's thin outside the US and GB." OK, hmmm, how do we get more global coverage? oh, of course, France would be fr.wiki and Germany would be de.wiki, that would really increase global coverage.

now you come in and say "but what about Canada, Australia, etc? there is no nz.wiki et al?" And then you have some ideas about how to do that, ideas which are not strictly "wikipedia" as we see in the headline idea.

Perhaps a relevant question: Are you describing a business need, a (supposedly) good way to implemented it, or how are you combining the two here?

> OK, hmmm, how do we get more global coverage?

Like I said, combine all the Wikipedia editions using Wikidata.

> oh, of course, France would be fr.wiki and Germany would be de.wiki

And of course, what language is e.g. Belgium (in your model)?

> And then you have some ideas about how to do that, ideas which are not strictly "wikipedia"

In this strict case, how do you remove duplicates (between the different language editions)?

Yup, that's it, thanks! My list of English-speaking countries just wasn't exhaustive and were the first I noticed with a higher density than the rest on first glance.

The language picker doesn't just change UI language, it changes which language Wikipedia is displayed.

There isn't really such thing as a "local Wikipedia" but of course coverage for a given country tends to be best on the Wikipedia in the language spoken there.

Not every language is supported (I think processing the fifteen Wikipedia dumps takes several days as is) but I believe the supported languages are the top 15 by number of articles.

Cool service! You could get rid of prerendering as well as handle clicks client-side if you switched to MapLibre and vector tiles (e.g. tippecanoe). On small zoom levels it doesn't really matter, but I think it would further improve the experience of zooming in.

I like it. What is missing, or I couldn't find, is a "find my location" option.

This is great. I remember thinking something like this would spice up travelling.

Oh no, there goes the rest of my morning ;)

Fun site, give him a high five for me

See also this official special page, which lists places nearby:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby

Completely useless for me:

> Wikipedia cannot determine your location. Please try again with a better signal.

I'm on a desktop. Plugged into wired internet. My "signal" is fine.

No way of manually specifying a location is provided.

oh, come on ...

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby#/coord/[lat],[lon]

EDIT: Doesn't seem to work, the pages ignores what I put there and doesn't change behaviour.

Maybe because op did post the mobile link, try https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby instead

The same problem occurs: "Wikipedia cannot determine your location. Please try again with a better signal."

EDIT: Same thing occurs in both Firefox and Chromium

Yep, seeing the same thing.

> No way of manually specifying a location is provided.

... and that's exactly the issue.

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.

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.

Looking things up in other urban areas does not yield this result for me. The grouping could be changed though. I can't click some Dots because there's on overlap with another dot.

I like the idea and will definitely visit again.

Yeah, it's pretty useless in New Orleans, too. This is just not designed to cope with a place that is so interesting that you can have big stretches with a half-dozen wikinotable locations in every single block.

There's no lens of "good" or "interesting". Its just whether something is in wikipedia. This site is showing us that existence is wikipedia isn't that high of a bar to distinguish that something is actually interesting.

Well I live in a fairly small city with not a lot nearby, and it's showing me unremarkable nearby high schools

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.

Love 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.

Yep. Leave the user at the level they chose. Don’t override their decisions.

I want to click around on the pins in focus. I’ll zoom in on the ones I find interesting.

Yes this is extremely annoying and the main reason I stopped playing with it despite being quite interested.

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.

Same. The view changing every time I click is very disorienting. and have to zoom back out after every click

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).

Is this inspired by https://www.preethamrn.com/posts/when-should-you-give-up?

Obviously

No, looks like this has been up for almost two years: https://web.archive.org/web/20220511125450/https://en.nearby...

Really neat. Thank you for posting.

Results are polluted for me with public transportation stations. I did not realize each of them had a wiki entry... of course geotagged.

Not sure how much parsing/filtering is done. Looks like the wiki entries for stations use a formated template "Infobox station".

I would vote to exclude those by default.

Also, in the list box, it seems I can only select to include result, not exclude. I would have done that for train stations and alike.

But thanks again!

Great 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?

Agreed, lots of good options

This is awesome. Well implemented. I just learnt something new about the area I'm living in.

When I road tripped across US & CA the atlasabscura was my go-to for finding weird and wonderful places to explore. It had a great mix of historic, weird, artistic, irrelevant and timeless.

I’ve been househunting on and off for the last year or so. It was a bit wild to see one house that was in my price range¹ has a Wikipedia article.

⸻

1. The big issue was that the house was going to need a lot of work to be made livable. Add in that it was historically significant (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright) and it wasn’t going to be a simple matter to rehab it, especially on a recently divorced dad budget.

I'm quite a big fan of this idea. There is a lot of local history that I suspect I'd never have learned about if some map like this didn't exist.

The one thing that would greatly streamline my own usage is a direct link to the Wikipedia page on the pin itself (without having to open the pin, wait for the modal, scroll to the Wikipedia link, then click through). I'm clicking around the local spots and opening the Wikipedia pages for the interesting locations in new tabs to read them all at once.

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_.

The Android app OsmAnd has a layer to display Wikipedia entries. I like the idea but like a few other people have commented here, some places there can be a lot of clutter from articles I'm not actually interested in. Maybe there could be a way to classify articles into broad categories and show a subset.

I once made a smartwatch interface for Wikipedia [1] and was intending on making it geolocate and tell you about interesting things you walk past.

However I stopped working an the project when (a) my project wouldn’t compile in the latest Android Studio without cutting and pasting every Java class, there was no auto-upgrade path that succeeded in compiling (b) Google EOL’d the search API I was using (c) every few months they wanted me to take some action to keep my app in the Play store and I got fed up with being asked to do unpaid work

[1] https://www.pcmag.com/news/attopedia-for-android-wear-puts-t...

Really cool.

OsmAnd+ has a similar functionality which allows you to download the Wikipedia articles for offline consumption for a zone with your maps. This is very interesting when you are on a hike, and can checkout some info about things you see

I'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?

Not yet :/ we’re wanting to validate the idea first.

Sounds fun but (for me) not worth clicking past a tracker popup with several hundred default-accept "legitimate interest" trackers with only the option to "object", not "reject" them as is shown for the "partners". Definitely not the sort of site I'm going to share my location with. (Not sure if it asks for location sharing but with a set of trackers like that I expect it does as it will be a significant source of revenue for them.)

Thank you! I immediately discovered some stuff about my local surroundings I had no idea about. For those of you who live in the Boulder area, have you ever noticed the pumpjack in the middle of that housing development at the beginning of the Diagonal heading towards Longmont? Well, it is on the National Register of Historic Places! [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKenzie_Well

Also try a map of places on Wikivoyage

https://wginsberg.github.io/wikivoyage-map

There should be an LLM version of this where places that aren't geotagged with lat/lng could also be included; Find a general place name, search for the cooridnates more specifically on the web or find clues like very-nearby places with coordinates attached, and then include those. Might have like orders of magnitude more results? Not sure how often places of interest are actually geotagged on their wiki.

I'm working on a version of this now called ExploreHere | Stories. It's an iOS app where you drive around, and the app generates stories based on what's around you (data pulled from various sources), puts together a single unified story, and reads it aloud to you.

If you / anyone else is interested in beta testing, let me know, I'd love to get some feedback!

It's nice, but it does group them too aggressively - the places I care about were full of (2) entries where both actual spots wouldn't even overlap, and the (2), of course, was in the in-between spot where there isn't anything interesting; and if I click on it, then it zooms in, preventing me from seeing the map which was at the scale I'd use to see how to get there.

Oh yeah, I built something very similar back in 2019 (app.mirrorspace.net - now dead). Mine also let users post things that were geotagged, and other users could only see posts they were physically within 50m of. I actually used it quite extensively during a holiday in Italy and Sicily, very interesting to visit supposedly the same exact places where Roman battles were fought and so on

Also try WikiShootme.

https://wikishootme.toolforge.org/

Very cool. Hungarians sure do love taking pictures of bus stops.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Bus_stops_in_Bud...

It’s whatever scratches your itch :-)

Super cool. I wish I could switch it to my local language. I see that there are a few alternative language wikis available. Unfortunately the English wiki does not have many points of interest outside of quite famous ones. I did not check the others, but I don't expect them to be any better than English for my country.

Looks like someone actually did the project described there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39232004

The original blog post was quite negative, building something like this doesn't necessarily need a specific audience, the audience can come over time.

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.

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.

Oops, my bad.

I'm using the F-Droid version, which is slightly behind, but has all (I think) features

OsmAnd+ also has this, but it can also pre-download the Wiki articles, so you don't need connectivity.

I made a version of this too. My favorite features is that you can get snippets of articles and have them read aloud (great for roadtrips). https://calebkruse.com/wikitrip/

Much nicer than the OP link! Thanks.

Curious where they're getting their data because I've never seen Toronto on an address line as: Toronto, Golden Horseshoe, Ontario, Canada. I think maybe it's potentially correct, but I've never seen that before in my life.

Really makes me miss "FieldTrip", a now-defunct Niantic app for iOS and Android that got shut off in 2019. It would just give you some interesting history, articles, tidbits or whatever about the place you were standing.

I built ExploreHere | Markers App (iOS), two years ago to help fill some of the void that FieldTrip left. It has over 200k historical and interpretive markers so you can learn a bit about whats around you.

Based on feedback from the community, I'm currently working on an Audio-Guide version that generates and reads interesting stories aloud to you as you drive, all hands free! If you're interested, I'd love to send you the beta and see what you think!? https://testflight.apple.com/join/ExaAqkU8

I'm in love with this idea but the interface is just so clunky. Clustering needs a bit of massaging and zooming in and out should be smoother. Also labels and clicking on places without opening a new page would be great.

This is awesome!

I currently live in a nondescript suburb of Los Angeles(Woodland Hills) and I’m always looking for interesting things to do in my area. This fits the bill exactly.

Also really liked the animation of the map when I typed in my area.

Cool idea and great execution.

You could also look at https://wikishootme.toolforge.org/ which shows nearby places that need photos uploaded

I built something like this years ago but I reverse geocoded all addresses in wikipedia and plotted all of the points -- there are a lot of places that are not actually geocoded in the data.

Wikipedia has grown a lot since then!

Back in the early days of Android there was a super little app called Wikitude, which was very useful for working out e.g. what stately home that was on a hill in the distance in the Kent countryside.

The zooming is awful. I feel like the map doesn't reload with my zoom so it's really hard to tell where I'm zoomed to except to reference the floating moving grouped points.

Hmm, this is strange. I am on Librewolf 122.0. At first things seem to load alright, but when I click on any place on the map it starts bouncing around like crazy to random places in rapid succession, making the app unusable. Then, when I hit refresh, I get a broken page until I Ctrl+Shift+R.

Librewolf is a fairly non-standard browser, but it's actually quite rare for me to have something break, especially catastrophically like this; I have no problems using it as a daily driver for literally anything. So I really wonder what is going on here, as there's no status indicator indicating any of the usual suspects (e.g. no "canvas data access blocked" in the location bar or anything like that.)

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".

From what I can tell, it includes any article that has been tagged with coordinates:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geograph...

This has been a feature in the Wikipedia mobile app for some time. It’s a real gem, I’ve found out some really interesting things about landmarks I pass every day.

i tried to find this but couldn't. is this available in the version uploaded to F-Droid?

Now, please make this into an app with driving directions and we can do use it while driving around. Drive to LA to SFO and see what attractions are along the way.

Quite cool and fairly easy to remember domain name. Suggest not including neighborhoods by default as it adds quite a bit of noise.

I would love if it didn’t auto zoom in whenever I click one. What an annoying feature.

"interesting" is a huge stretch. I'd estimatte that there's not even 1% of places that are actually interesting there.

In London it's all big roads, schools and tube stations.

Install the Atlas Obscura app on your phone and it comes with a map of actually interesting places around you.

Ok but they seriously need to not zoom in on every site you click on.

I liked the idea but not the UI.

Cool "Try Again" simulator.

Excellent!

It looks like it received the HN hug of death.

Edit: it's working now.

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