[HN Gopher] Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia
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Explore interesting places nearby listed on Wikipedia
Author : udev4096
Score : 109 points
Date : 2024-02-06 06:13 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (en.nearbywiki.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.nearbywiki.org)
| netule wrote:
| It looks like it received the HN hug of death.
|
| Edit: it's working now.
| calebkruse wrote:
| 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/
| nicwolff wrote:
| Much nicer than the OP link! Thanks.
| thierrydamiba wrote:
| 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.
| brokensegue wrote:
| You could also look at https://wikishootme.toolforge.org/ which
| shows nearby places that need photos uploaded
| speps wrote:
| 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.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Also try WikiShootme.
|
| https://wikishootme.toolforge.org/
| popcalc wrote:
| Very cool. Hungarians sure do love taking pictures of bus
| stops.
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Bus_stops_in_Bud...
| Fission wrote:
| 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.
| ybc37 wrote:
| See also this official special page, which lists places nearby:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby
| Loughla wrote:
| 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.
| colechristensen wrote:
| 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".
| pavon wrote:
| From what I can tell, it includes any article that has been
| tagged with coordinates:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Geograph...
| bbor wrote:
| 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_.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| 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.
| pimlottc wrote:
| 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.
| gigel82 wrote:
| 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).
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| 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.
| supportengineer wrote:
| This is amazing! Would make a great AR layer for Apple Vision Pro
| bayjird wrote:
| Also try a map of places on Wikivoyage
|
| https://wginsberg.github.io/wikivoyage-map
| throwaway280338 wrote:
| 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.
| saewitz wrote:
| Is this inspired by https://www.preethamrn.com/posts/when-should-
| you-give-up?
| neom wrote:
| 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.
| dheera wrote:
| 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...
| superhumanuser wrote:
| 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.
| mat_epice wrote:
| 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.
| RileyJames wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2024-02-07 23:00 UTC)