Find articles by location with Wikipedia Nearby

Wikipedia has announced a new feature called Nearby, which will highlight the Wikipedia entries about your surroundings. This feature is available only for the mobile site of Wikipedia and will work in conjunction with the location tracking feature of mobile phones. The new feature will highlight information like historic sites, parks, museums, theatres, cafes and religious buildings around you. Announcing the new initiative, Wikipedia said on its blog, “We are happy to announce that the Wikimedia Foundation mobile team has been working on a Nearby page. Along with the goal of bringing awareness of 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”.

The blog added, “The Nearby feature, although designed with the Wikipedia mobile experience in mind, also works on the desktop version of Wikipedia. In the future, we envision this as a useful step in the editing onboarding process, helping new users learn about editing by encouraging them to improve an article on a topic nearby”. The mobile team has focused on using the Nearby page to highlight articles in close proximity that lack images, inviting users to add one. Upon visiting those pages, 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.