Wikipedia API for geolocations

Question

Is it possible, using the existing Wikipedia API's to get a list of articles around a Geo-location? Sort of like how Google maps does it?

I would like to say that I am "here" and find out what is around me on Wikipedia.

I can see on articles like this you can see the "Coordinates" on the right hand side, so I would like to do a query on these coordinates...

any thoughts?

You might even be able to use Google maps's API to get results from their Wikipedia layer. — Benny Jobigan, Nov 16 '10 at 04:51
just found this: http://www.geonames.org/export/wikipedia-webservice.html#findNearbyWikipedia which might help me out... — Mark, Nov 16 '10 at 05:00

ZJR · Answer 1 · 2016-08-25T10:00:23.953

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UPDATED ANSWER:
Wikilocation has been retired and now there is an OFFICIAL WIKIPEDIA API

? action=query
& list=geosearch
& gsradius=<radius-in-meters>
& gscoord=<lat>|<lon>

HTML example | JSON Example

edited Aug 25 '16 at 10:00

answered Dec 23 '14 at 03:25

ZJR

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score 16 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 07 '21 at 11:00

16

Don't reinvent the wheel, use DBpedia.
Sample page with "lat" and "lon" data extracted.
And it can be queried with SPARQL.

edited Feb 07 '21 at 11:00

Adrian Farmadin

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answered Nov 18 '10 at 00:13

lambshaanxy

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Interesting, I did not know that project even existed! Thanks Ill take a good look at it :) – Mark Nov 18 '10 at 02:27
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@jpatokal: how to use dbpedia to solve the problems OP posted? can u shed some light on this? – Abhinav Feb 07 '18 at 13:00
Nowadays, this is implemented in query.wikidata.org. – Pere Dec 26 '22 at 20:29

score 10 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 19 '14 at 13:34

10

This is nowadays built into Wikipedia through Special:Nearby.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby

answered Jul 19 '14 at 13:34

Ainali

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score 10 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 24 '12 at 08:52

10

Have a look at Wikilocation, might be useful.

answered Mar 24 '12 at 08:52

xidew

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UPDATE: Wikilocation has been retired and now there is an [OFFICIAL WIKIPEDIA API](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GeoData#API) – ZJR Dec 23 '14 at 03:22

score 5 · Answer 5 · answered Nov 16 '10 at 05:41

It seems like there is no Wikipedia API for this, but this Wikipedia page describes how others make use of this information:

All coordinates are available for download in Wikipedia database dumps. To get the coordinates from the XML format dump of all articles (enwiki-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2, 4 GB), the dump needs to be parsed for pages containing coordinates in the entry formats listed above. Most articles in Wikipedia conform to these formats and coordinates are easy to parse from the wikitext with regular expressions for simple character sequences. As all coordinates link to the same PHP tool, they may also be found from the SQL format table of external links (enwiki-latest-externallinks.sql.gz, 725MB). This second method will however not include all available information about the coordinates, such as their position between the article body and the title area.

Thanks Philipp, I did manage to get some DB dumps, its a pity that you have to go down this path. But like I commented, I might just use the http://www.geonames.org/export/wikipedia-webservice.html#findNearbyWikipedia service for now... — Mark, Nov 16 '10 at 06:32
The coordinates are actually pretty time consuming to parse as they come in few different formats. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Coord for more details about the formats. — Filip, Aug 16 '12 at 19:30

score 5 · Answer 6 · edited Jun 19 '16 at 14:05

Solution jquery and geonames API:

a,b = longitude, latitude, tweet -> html div

function getcontent(a,b) {
    jQuery(function($) {
        $.getJSON('http://api.geonames.org/findNearbyWikipediaJSON?formatted=true&lat='+ a +'&lng='+ b +'&username=username&style=full&lang=de&wikipediaUrl&thumbnailImg', function(json) {
            for(var i = 0; i < json.geonames.length; i++) {
                $("#tweet").prepend('<span style="font-family: geneva, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;"><br><br><img src="wikilogo.gif"><br>' + json.geonames[i].summary + '<br><a href="http://'+ json.geonames[i].wikipediaUrl +'" target="_blank">'+ json.geonames[i].wikipediaUrl +'</a><br></span>');
            }
        }); 
    }); 
}

score 3 · Answer 7 · edited Jan 24 '19 at 01:20

I know, this is an old question, but here is the URL format for a similar query:

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=geosearch&format=json&gscoord=40.418670|-3.699389&gsradius=10000&gslimit=10

after &gscoord= you should put the coordinates separated by |, and after &gsradius= the search radius in meters, gslimit is the max number of entries in response.

The response contains JSON.

score 1 · Answer 8 · edited Sep 25 '12 at 09:42

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DBpedia and SPARQL are not good options, at least not for the German Wikipedia: The coverage is too small.

I'm trying to parse all the different geo coordinate formats by myself right now (from the dumps), but that's quite difficult as there are really a lot of different variants.

edited Sep 25 '12 at 09:42

j0k

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answered Sep 04 '12 at 09:34

user1645736

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Wikipedia API for geolocations

8 Answers8