GeoData: view Wikipedia or Wikivoyage pages about places close to your location: Process and Opportunities.
Available officially, since January 31, 2013 , henceforth via your mobile
devices, GeoData will allow you to view , tag Wikipedia or Wikivoyage pages
about places close to your location.
In fact since this date the Wikipedia foundation has presented us the GeoData extension for MediaWiki.
This means that GeoData can provide a way to store geo-coordinates for articles, as well as an API to make queries around this information.
Henceforth: ‘’Coordinates
added to articles are now stored separately in the database, as opposed to
being stored arbitrarily in wiki markup. This makes it easy to query the
coordinates of a particular page or a list of pages around a given set of
coordinates. The Solr search engine is used for spatial queries, making the searches extremely
fast. All the functionality is also available via the API, allowing developers to
create tools that use this data.’’
The process aims to be simple:
GeoData adds a new MediaWiki parser function called {{#coordinates}} that saves coordinates passed
to it into the database.
Here is an example: if the Connectikpeople office is located at 37° 47′
13.09″ North, 122° 23′ 58.84″ West, it can be tagged like that: {{#coordinates:primary|37|47|13.09|N|122|23|58.84|W}} or with decimals: {{#coordinates:primary|37.78697|-122.39967}}. primary indicates here that these are the coordinates of the article’s primary
subject, as opposed to other coordinates mentioned in the article.
Now to add the articles, according to Max Semenik Software Engineer, Mobile:
‘’GeoData requires some manual setup to start collecting data on a given
wiki. The {{#coordinates}} tag needs to be inserted into the template used
for geotagging (example change), and the job queue will process the pages that use it. This can be done on all sites where
the GeoData extension is enabled: all Wikipedia and Wikivoyage sites, as well
as special projects (like Commons). At least four projects are already actively
using it: Wikipedia in English, German, Simple English and Chinese.
It’s also recommended to create a tracking category to which GeoData will
add pages with invalid coordinates. The name of this maintenance category can
be localized by editing the MediaWiki:Geodata-broken-tags-category system message.’’
If you need help setting up GeoData on your wiki, you can join the team on
the #wikimedia-mobile channel on Freenode
IRC.
