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Comment by esperent | Hacker News Reader

This is a great idea but I'd definitely make the distance configurable. Where I am right now would need several hours walking to reach anywhere Wikipedia worthy but if I expanded to say a 15km circle there's probably a couple of places of interest.

Meanwhile if someone lives in a city they'll get loads of results.

EDIT: actually this is just a wrapper around wikipedia's nearby feature I think. I tried a couple of places and they give identical results.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby#/coord/15.90721...

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> EDIT: actually this is just a wrapper around wikipedia's nearby feature I think.

It does at least add a useful feature: being able to state a location to search from. The Wikipedia page (unless there is one other than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby that is more flexible) will only work off your current location, which is completely turned off on my work machine. Also upon checking on my phone, even with “desktop site” forced, the map looks to be an additional feasure too.

> The Wikipedia page [...] will only work off your current location

You can put the coordinates of any location in the URL. One way to get that is in google maps, when you right click and click on the coordinates. Paste it where the coordinates go in the URL and remove the space after the comma.

It appears to limit itself to 50 results though, which only got me results up to 930 m away from the location I picked near me.

Correct. The default Wikipedia mobile app has this as well.

I have the opposite problem - I live a half hour walk from central Cambridge UK, so results are full of the tourist destinations!

Disclaimer: I work for the Wikimedia Foundation, albeit in the infrastructure rather than in development / product.

I like this feature a lot, but I do not know how it is implemented and whether it would be possible to have users change the range. Maybe it is hardcoded for some performance reason, I have honestly no clue. But I am giving below a few paths that could help one eventually improve the system.

The page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby is powered by the MediaWiki extension https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:NearbyPages .

The source code is https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/mediawiki/extensions/NearbyPa... (GitHub mirror https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki-extensions-NearbyPage... ).

Issues/bugs are tracked at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/nearbypages/ , it is possible a similar request already exists there.

Do note I am not in the development / product side and I have no view about their backlog or whether they have the bandwidth to review such an incoming review request or a patch.

For what it's worth, the actual search backend seems to be implemented in the separate "GeoData" extension: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GeoData

That extension exposes a public API that allows setting any search radius up to 10 km ( https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query... ), so presumably there's no barrier to making the search radius smaller, but maybe there'd be performance issues if you allowed making it larger.

(NearbyPages just embeds a Vue app into the page that makes a client-side fetch() call to invoke that API with a hard-coded radius.)

The Special:Nearby feature seems to support changing the language. nearbywiki.org is just English while the OP has a language switch but it's limited.

Now I'm not sure if switching the language pulls in more results or just changes the article language...

When you change the language you are essentially moving to a different Wikipedia site, so yes it does - it pulls the results from the local site you are on.

Ok so in theory you'll get the best results on Wikipedia in the local language... if the locals have bothered to fill in Wikipedia.

I'm in North London, 500 entries for me, including several pubs.

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

Oh, it doesn't try to fall back to geofencing, hmm?

In the same vein all of my results are schools except two so it would be nice to have some filters on keyword.

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