Very cool. Obvious in hindsight with every location having coordinates.
Found an abbey around my place in Western Bavaria I didn't know existed
thatwasunusual · 2026-10-23 06:27:15 UTC
I love it. It would also be nice to be able to a) enter desired distance, and b) choose the metric system.
kls0e · 2026-10-23 06:37:25 UTC
thanks a lot, +1 für b).
ortichic · 2026-10-23 06:39:14 UTC
c) select the Wikipedia language. There are some English Wikipedia articles for my region, but my local language Wikipedia has much more
dllu · 2026-10-23 06:27:44 UTC
Cool idea! I had lots of fun looking at stuff nearby.
Right now it seems that it simply removes links for stuff without a geotag that's nearby. But many articles are in fact nearby and are simply missing geotags, or perhaps encompass a slightly larger area where only a part of it is close by. Also, all the pictures don't have working links so I can't click on a picture to make it bigger.
noduerme · 2026-10-23 06:32:45 UTC
This is super cool! Just punched in my zip code, and hit "random article" three times, and came up with three weird stories I didn't know about the history of places within a few blocks of me in Portland, Oregon. What an awesome idea for travelers!
jayknight · 2026-10-23 13:51:10 UTC
Yeah, But I didn't really want to read this article as I was waking up...
Is it possible to change the language of Wikipedia? For many places, the local language Wikipedia has more articles.
snickerer · 2026-10-23 07:20:07 UTC
Yes!!
And with today's translation programs, the user does not even need to understand the local language.
Better — for me — would even be a mix of languages. Give me the most and longest articles of all languages for the places around.
Which I never used because it requires permission to see my location, and at home, my ISP gives a location far from where I live anyway. So even if I allowed it, it would be meaningless.
So, unless there is some way to manually enter a town name or ZIP code that I missed, the feature is unusable, which is a shame.
> Which I never used because it requires permission to see my location
A healthy mistrust.
It's bizare how many people give their coodinates to any random website that asks for them.
djeastm · 2026-10-24 22:18:36 UTC
Generally agree, but this is Wikipedia we're talking about.
jayknight · 2026-10-23 13:49:12 UTC
You can go to any article with location data, click the coordinates to go to the geohack page with links to all kinds of data about that location, which includes a link to "List of nearby articles" which takes you back to wikipedia's nearby search for that location. So from the White House page:
Speaking of: All the OP link does is pull articles from Wikipedia. Am I in a minority in not seeing the point? When I read the title I expected it to be a site for locals to share their knowledge, that would have been really cool. It's strangers who'd benefit most from local knowledge, people generally know their homes and what's around them. It also didn't even work when I tried it and showed articles that were over 100 miles off the location I input.
Trigodil · 2026-10-23 06:49:44 UTC
This is so cool, although I would like a feature to filter by subtopic or what the structures are used for (e.g. churches, bridges, museums).
slyall · 2026-10-23 06:52:07 UTC
I found out that a closed church I walk past regularly was called "St Chad's"
Elucalidavah · 2026-10-23 06:53:37 UTC
Related: OsmAnd has support for wikipedia-sourced points for the local offline maps. Not sure about the details though. Only related thing I found for an explanation is "Geospatial Wikidata Dataset", which is suspiciously fresh.
aembleton · 2026-10-23 10:57:31 UTC
Comaps also has offline wikipedia entries. So you can be on a hill, and read about the iron age fort that was once there.
esperent · 2026-10-23 06:54:41 UTC
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.
I have the opposite problem - I live a half hour walk from central Cambridge UK, so results are full of the tourist destinations!
hashar · 2026-10-23 09:10:38 UTC
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.
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.
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.)
nottorp · 2026-10-23 10:00:39 UTC
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...
alentred · 2026-10-23 15:04:35 UTC
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.
nottorp · 2026-10-24 09:14:10 UTC
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.
dukeyukey · 2026-10-23 12:58:03 UTC
I'm in North London, 500 entries for me, including several pubs.
tannertech · 2026-10-23 09:36:00 UTC
Correct. The default Wikipedia mobile app has this as well.
throwaway173738 · 2026-10-23 13:27:28 UTC
In the same vein all of my results are schools except two so it would be nice to have some filters on keyword.
dspillett · 2026-10-23 13:47:34 UTC
> 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.
drivers99 · 2026-10-23 15:55:17 UTC
> 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.
zahlman · 2026-10-23 19:50:08 UTC
> Wikipedia cannot determine your location. Please try again with a better signal.
Oh, it doesn't try to fall back to geofencing, hmm?
mvdwoord · 2026-10-23 06:56:59 UTC
Vey nicely done! One issue though, not many local articles in english here. I see no obvious way to change language?
Osmand for android also embeds results on the map, as an optional layer.
dyauspitr · 2026-10-23 06:59:14 UTC
Very nice! It really should have a field to enter the radius of the search.
ChrisGreenHeur · 2026-10-23 07:00:16 UTC
I guess it works but I have no idea what a yard or a mile is.
retsibsi · 2026-10-23 07:23:38 UTC
Metric rules and imperial drools, I agree, but I reckon if we put our minds to it we can multiply by 0.9 and 1.6 (or 0.91 and 1.61 if you are genius). Keeps the mind sharp in this age of outsourced thinking!
numpad0 · 2026-10-23 07:50:52 UTC
A mile is supposed to be (1 / 60 / 360 / Earth.circumferenceOf()), so a 1.5mi radius or 3mi diameter circle is (supposed to be slightly short of) 3/60 or 0.05 degrees on a map.
A yard is just 10% short of a meter, just the same thing for most practical purposes.
(full disclosure: I did look these up)
vintagedave · 2026-10-23 07:12:15 UTC
Like others, I agree this is very cool.
I live somewhere pretty remote, and every article it suggests is an entry for a nearby village, which is usually a sentence long. There are other interesting things nearby: could it have some kind of variance function, so it looks specifically for a variety of content?
Here I am, seeing something cool and immediately asking for changes. Spirit of the internet ;) Genuinely, it is a wonderful idea, and I admire the concept and that you did it.
user_7832 · 2026-10-23 08:12:53 UTC
Very similar, except I live in a very large city... but it's not an anglophile 1st world country, so tr list is full of streets and unis and roads. "Hey do you know your <location> features <location station>!?" lol
INTPenis · 2026-10-23 07:16:42 UTC
This is a really fun idea, but I went from excited to disgusted in the span of one click.
The first thing that pops up for my city of Malmö is the school stabbing that happened in 2022. They're so rare here, and yet Wikipedia felt I just had to see it.
I'm not going to make stupid feature requests, but it would be cool with a filter for types of Wikipedia articles to show.
zulko · 2026-10-23 10:48:09 UTC
I made a map of Wikipedia pages and events once [1] and a key decision was: which pages to show first, and which to show only when the user zooms in?
I went with "let's show pages with the most words first". If people spent more time writing a page, it must be a great topic, right? Unfortunately, this also surfaces all the wars, crimes, accidents and controversies that generated the most coverage. These are the most active pages on Wikipedia.
Content that is curated by interested humans, without commercial interests, is so good.
bcvvvy · 2026-10-23 07:27:33 UTC
This is the World Wide Web I want to see. Amazing job. Thank you!
dzogchen · 2026-10-23 07:27:46 UTC
Very cool idea. Would be even better if it had an option to use a local language.
darkest_ruby · 2026-10-23 07:29:55 UTC
Distances measured in yards for European destinations is an insult
valleyer · 2026-10-23 07:33:20 UTC
To convert to meters, multiply by 1.
Rotundo · 2026-10-23 07:46:44 UTC
That's an imperial meter, a standard SI meter is about ten percent longer.
ButlerianJihad · 2026-10-23 07:56:30 UTC
I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-16 back home; they're not much bigger than two meters!
adrianmonk · 2026-10-23 17:29:31 UTC
Use the Force, Luke, but it's up to you to decide how many newtons.
bluGill · 2026-10-23 11:43:59 UTC
For realistic purposes that is well within rounding error and they are the same. Most measures should not be that precise.
nkrisc · 2026-10-24 17:53:51 UTC
Good enough for this.
ChrisRR · 2026-10-23 08:16:51 UTC
Multiply by 0.914
pezezin · 2026-10-23 07:58:43 UTC
> Distances measured in yards for non-US destinations is an insult
FTFY. I live in Japan and it also shows me the distance in yards and miles.
roryirvine · 2026-10-23 07:59:10 UTC
And mixes it with miles, too. Crazy decision.
flohofwoe · 2026-10-23 08:16:22 UTC
Could that be a UK thing? I wouldn't know tbh, because between mixing yards and miles versus sticking to imperial units in the 21st century, the latter is definitely crazier ;)
petepete · 2026-10-23 08:20:47 UTC
Yep, we mix them up. Distance and speed in miles, fuel priced in pounds per litre.
dukky · 2026-10-23 09:08:18 UTC
And fuel economy in miles per gallon!
arethuza · 2026-10-23 12:45:05 UTC
Driving distances in miles, walking distances in kilometers!
roryirvine · 2026-10-23 13:43:20 UTC
And, though admittedly not really exposed much to the public, canals and railways both manage to mix chains in there, too... agh!
arethuza · 2026-10-23 13:48:16 UTC
And thinking about the height of mountains in meters even though the reason for walking up them is because they reach a certain height in feet.
wkjagt · 2026-10-23 11:03:09 UTC
In Canada we have imperial for short measurements (inches and feet for lumber, people's heights) but metric for longer distances (kilometers for driving distances for example)
ChrisRR · 2026-10-23 12:26:26 UTC
I don't see the issue. Miles and yards are both imperial units.
ChrisRR · 2026-10-23 12:25:31 UTC
Why is that crazy? They're both imperial units
roryirvine · 2026-10-23 13:40:03 UTC
Because to convert from one to t'other, you have to multiply by 22 x 10 x 8 or whatever it is, rather than simply shift the digits.
For example, there's a park that's 1 mi 180 yds from me - if you were to pick one and stick with it then you could say either 1.1 mis or 1940 yds, rather than mixing the two and expecting people to do multiple rounds of arithmetic.
ChrisRR · 2026-10-23 15:09:33 UTC
Well yeah, imperial units are a mess. But keeping it all imperial or all metric is better than mixing the two
flohofwoe · 2026-10-23 08:09:38 UTC
Hmm, I see metric distances (kilometers). Accessing from Germany. It's still using the English Wikipedia though, not the German one (which I think would have more local content).
PS: there's a side bar link to switch between miles and km, I might have pressed that (was expecting to see some sort of distance map though instead of switching between 'imperial' and 'modern' ;)
jherdman · 2026-10-23 14:09:29 UTC
Heh, yeah. I found the imperial units to be very jarring as a Canadian.
alnwlsn · 2026-10-23 15:39:11 UTC
I rarely see yards used in the united states outside of football and other sports. Usually, distances to travel will go as feet, then right into miles. I can't think of many people who wouldn't say "quarter mile" over "440 yards". Anything less than that is in feet. Buildings and structures are measured in square feet, our long tape measures are usually labeled "300 feet" and not "100 yard", and in land surveying, measurements are often done in (decimal) feet.
One place I do come across yards is in "a yard of dirt" (or mulch, sand, concrete, etc) where it means cubic yard.
charonn0 · 2026-10-25 17:45:51 UTC
You can choose to take offense, but that doesn't imply that offense was given.
zkmon · 2026-10-23 07:44:08 UTC
I consider this to be far more progress for humanity than landing on moon or sending a spaceship to outside of solar system. That's because this move is in the right direction, while others are not. As a human, you need to first master your habitat around you, before getting excited or concerned about things that happen in another country thousands of miles away.
vasco · 2026-10-23 07:47:47 UTC
You wouldn't even have spices thinking like that
zkmon · 2026-10-23 18:36:39 UTC
You don't need them if they are not native to your place and if you are native of your place.
vasco · 2026-10-24 07:38:38 UTC
Yeah no man, take your nationalistic crap somewhere else, I like spices and stuff from other places
Having an encyclopedia entirely sourced in an LLM that is easily manipulated and prone to "hallucination" doesn't seem like a great idea, that's why not.
trombuance · 2026-10-24 07:34:11 UTC
I was very skeptical of the idea of a bot encyclopedia myself, but after looking up a few random articles and comparing them with human-authored encyclopedias, I can't say it's worse. One of the articles was actually substantially less biased than the Wikipedia version.
The LLM sources from the same reliable sources as Wikipedia (including Wikipedia itself). Wikipedia is arguably easier manipulated and known to be heavily astroturfed by governments, corporations and political activists. To manipulate Grokipedia you'd have to either hack xAI, which would almost certainly be discovered, or rewrite all its sources.
Comments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby
Found an abbey around my place in Western Bavaria I didn't know existed
Right now it seems that it simply removes links for stuff without a geotag that's nearby. But many articles are in fact nearby and are simply missing geotags, or perhaps encompass a slightly larger area where only a part of it is close by. Also, all the pictures don't have working links so I can't click on a picture to make it bigger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_of_Ell_Persons
It's cool, but a bit sad, to discover establishments that used to exist nearby but don't any longer. It's not easy to do that otherwise.
Because of earthquakes maybe?
Had some meaningful conversations at the Cafe (which I assume finally closed as well). I never liked the Starbucks across the street.
You can let it pick your own location, and if you rewrite the language prefix at the beginning of the url, you get that language's version. [2][3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby#/coord/15.90721...
[2] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby#/coord/15.90721...
[3] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby#/coord/15.90721...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby
So, unless there is some way to manually enter a town name or ZIP code that I missed, the feature is unusable, which is a shame.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby#/coord/52.52000...
Change the lat long to any you want, and change "en." to other language codes to search a different (language) encyclopedia.
https://www.location-guard.com/
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/change-geolocation-...
A healthy mistrust.
It's bizare how many people give their coodinates to any random website that asks for them.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_House ->
2. https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=White_Hou... ->
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby#/coord/38.89777...
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...
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.
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.)
Now I'm not sure if switching the language pulls in more results or just changes the article language...
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.
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.
Oh, it doesn't try to fall back to geofencing, hmm?
Has local language too.
A yard is just 10% short of a meter, just the same thing for most practical purposes.
(full disclosure: I did look these up)
I live somewhere pretty remote, and every article it suggests is an entry for a nearby village, which is usually a sentence long. There are other interesting things nearby: could it have some kind of variance function, so it looks specifically for a variety of content?
Here I am, seeing something cool and immediately asking for changes. Spirit of the internet ;) Genuinely, it is a wonderful idea, and I admire the concept and that you did it.
The first thing that pops up for my city of Malmö is the school stabbing that happened in 2022. They're so rare here, and yet Wikipedia felt I just had to see it.
I'm not going to make stupid feature requests, but it would be cool with a filter for types of Wikipedia articles to show.
I went with "let's show pages with the most words first". If people spent more time writing a page, it must be a great topic, right? Unfortunately, this also surfaces all the wars, crimes, accidents and controversies that generated the most coverage. These are the most active pages on Wikipedia.
[1] https://landnotes.org/?location=u0q9wgry-5&paneTab=about
FTFY. I live in Japan and it also shows me the distance in yards and miles.
For example, there's a park that's 1 mi 180 yds from me - if you were to pick one and stick with it then you could say either 1.1 mis or 1940 yds, rather than mixing the two and expecting people to do multiple rounds of arithmetic.
PS: there's a side bar link to switch between miles and km, I might have pressed that (was expecting to see some sort of distance map though instead of switching between 'imperial' and 'modern' ;)
One place I do come across yards is in "a yard of dirt" (or mulch, sand, concrete, etc) where it means cubic yard.
https://grokipedia.com
The LLM sources from the same reliable sources as Wikipedia (including Wikipedia itself). Wikipedia is arguably easier manipulated and known to be heavily astroturfed by governments, corporations and political activists. To manipulate Grokipedia you'd have to either hack xAI, which would almost certainly be discovered, or rewrite all its sources.