Wikimedia serves up location-based Wikipedia articles with ‘Nearby’

This looks pretty cool. The Wikimedia foundation, the charitable organisation behind Wikipedia and its affiliates, has launched Nearby, a service that surfaces Wikipedia articles based on your location.

According to the foundation, the aim of the service is to bring awareness of the surrounding areas to its existing readers, as well as to attract new editors to the articles. One of the main ways Wikipedia will benefit from these articles is by people adding images to them.

Upon visiting a page called up by Nearby, says the foundation, “the user will be prompted to illustrate the article, which they can do quickly and easily if they’re on a mobile device that supports taking and uploading photos”.

“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,” says Jon Robson, Software Engineer, Mobile at the Wikimedia Foundation.

“We are happy to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation mobile team has been working on a Nearby page to surface this information,” he continues. “Along with the goal of bringing awareness of the surrounding areas to our existing readers, we hope that this simple tool can attract new editors to these articles, whether it is to update the information on the exhibits in a local museum, or simply to add a photo of a nearby park that is in severe need of a properly licensed lead image.”

People can access Nearby via the main menu in the mobile Web version of Wikipedia. Click on it, give it permission to access your location and it’ll start calling up articles.

While the service will be useful for people looking to discover new things about the area they live in, we can see it as being massively useful for tourists or for people arriving in a new town. Putting the service on the mobile web version of Wikipedia makes sense too.

The online encyclopedia is available as a native app on a number of smartphone and tablet platforms, but a large portion of its users come from emerging market countries where those platforms are not generally used. It is also those areas which have articles more likely to need extensive editing.

And while the product is designed mainly for mobile, a desktop version is available, which will make more careful editing easier.