[1]Wikipedia has, without a doubt, been the most preferred source of information on an infinite number of topics for scores of people around the world. While the website has the answers to topics that people specifically go looking for, it’s not uncommon that we do spend time reading random topics on it.
Now how much more interesting would it get if we could still read random topics, but ones that are more relevant to where we live or go? Ones that we can relate to and make use of more?
That’s precisely the logic behind Wikipedia’s latest feature — Nearby — which recommends articles to users based on a their location. The feature will make it much easier to get info on nearby pages whether you are at home or on vacation. The Wikimedia Foundation has been testing a few applications that tie location data with pages since January, when it added a new GeoData extension for MediaWiki to provide geo-coordinates for many articles.
Wikipedia said in a blog post recently, “Thanks to the terrific work of our editor community, Wikipedia has accumulated a massive amount of location data associated with its millions of articles; until now we have not fully taken advantage of this information.”
Although Nearby was built for mobile, it can also accommodate Wikipedia’s desktop version. An example of the Nearby page is that visitors to Vatican City will see articles on the Sistine Chapel and Michelangelo’s fresco depicting The Last Judgment.
While the novel feature is designed to aid users more, the Wikimedia team had a specific purpose behind developing it — the Nearby page aims to attract new editors who can update information, especially visual images, to the articles. This is why the page is currently designed to pull up articles that lack images, so that users can update them with photos via their mobile device.
Links:
[1] http://103.241.136.51/t3jpg-922