Extension:GeoData/blogpost

GeoData: a new age of geotagging on Wikipedia

Have you ever wondered if there are Wikipedia articles about things near you? Well, wonder no more! Today the GeoData extension for MediaWiki was officially enabled, providing a structured way to store geo-coordinates for articles, as well as an API to make queries around this information.

What it does
Coordinates added to articles are stored separately in the database (as opposed to being stored arbitrarily in wiki markup), making 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 other developers to access it to create tools that use this data.

Where we will use it
One of the first consumers of this data will be the experimental mode of the Wikipedia mobile site which will allow you to see a list of nearby articles. We expect to release this feature into our experimental mode in the coming weeks. In the future, we hope to build this functionality right into our contributor pipelines. For instance, we'd like to be able to show you a map of articles needing images near by and have you upload photos then and there.

How it works
GeoData adds a new parser function, Extension:GeoData which saves coordinates passed to it into the database. For example, if the Wikimedia Foundation office is located at 37° 47′ 13.09″ North, 122° 23′ 58.84″ West, it can be tagged like that:   or with decimals:   . primary indicates here that these are the coordinates of the article's primary subject, as opposed to other coordinates mentioned in the article.

Setting it up
GeoData requires some manual setup to start collecting the data. Typically, all that is needed is to insert the  tag into a template, and wait some time for the job queue to process the pages that use it (example changes). Currently, this extension is enabled on all Wikipedia and Wikivoyage sites, as well as special projects (like Commons); at least four projects are already actively using it (English, German, Simple English and Chinese Wikipedia). Also, consider creating a tracking category where GeoData will add pages with invalid coordinates. This category's name is adjustable by editing the MediaWiki:Geodata-broken-tags-category system message. If you need help setting GeoData up, join us on #wikimedia-mobile on IRC.