Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Miscellaneous/Use map for Nearby

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Use map for Nearby

  • Problem: Special:Nearby is not really useful in its current form – it displays a list with some articles, but the user can neither broaden the area nor select a completely other place (or select any place if the browser doesn’t have the necessary API).
  • Who would benefit: Users not having the Android or iOS app who want to use Nearby.
  • Proposed solution: Use a map on Special:Nearby (or let the user chose between the list and map format).
  • More comments: Maybe a search field with traditional GET request could be added to make this function usable at all for JavaScript-less users.
  • Phabricator tickets:
  • Proposer: Tacsipacsi (talk) 16:33, 17 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion[edit]

I'd also would just love to make it possible to easily enable this layer when you click on a coordinate in an article. I see it as just another navigation method. If you want, you should be able to just keep clicking on, deeper and deeper into Wikipedia. An article, a map, annotations in an image, or a timeline, it shouldn't have to be an article if I want to go to a related article ! —TheDJ (talkcontribs) 14:12, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I think it should be opt-in in articles, as it might not be useful everywhere (e.g. if there’s a map with the US national parks, there should be only the national parks on the map, not every article about places in the US). Also it’s less useful as wikis may not use Kartographer, and it’s nearly impossible to develop it for all existing map techniques. Otherwise it would be great, but wikis should change to Kartographer to let it work. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 14:30, 18 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

As a kind of straw man demo, i worked up a bare bones example of putting search results on a map combined with using search's nearcoord keyword to restrict results to the area currently being viewed some time ago when we first released the geo keywords for search. This is of course not a solution to this request, but perhaps something to start thinking about how much data we have available (although this limits markers to 50 at a time so they don't overlap so much, and it's currently hard coded to enwiki but could be changed). EBernhardson (WMF) (talk) 21:58, 28 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

What about linking the wiwosm/osm-on-ol-tool (description) and metawikimedia:WikiMiniAtlas? --X:: black ::X (talk) 14:57, 10 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

I would rather imagine a Kartographer-based solution as it’s already on-wiki (and its map looks much better IMO). —Tacsipacsi (talk) 22:39, 10 December 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting[edit]