GeoData: a new age of geotagging on Wikipedia
Posted by Max Semenik on January 31st, 2013
On mobile devices, GeoData will allow you to view Wikipedia or Wikivoyage pages about places close to your location.
Have you ever wondered if there are Wikipedia articles about things near you? Well, wonder no more! Today, we present the GeoData extension for MediaWiki, which now provides a structured way to store geo-coordinates for articles, as well as an API to make queries around this information.
What does it do?
Coordinates added to articles are now stored separately in the database, as opposed to being stored arbitrarily in wiki markup. This makes it easy to query the coordinates of a particular page or a list of pages around a given set of coordinates. The Solr search engine is used for spatial queries, making the searches extremely fast. All the functionality is also available via the API, allowing developers to create tools that use this data.
Where will it be used?
One of the first major uses of GeoData information will be in the experimental modeof the Wikipedia mobile site, which will allow beta users to see a list of nearby articles. We expect to release this feature into our experimental mode in the coming weeks. In the future, we also hope to build this functionality into our contribution tools: for instance, we’d like to be able to show users a map of articles needing images near their location, so that they can easily take and upload photos of subjects around them missing an illustration.
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