Local Explorer

During the travel restrictions imposed under the Covid epidemic I became much more interested in local history and my local environment. In order to avoid becoming stir crazy I became an intrepid local explorer. 

Instead of traipsing day-after-day around the same old streets I decided to reinvigorate my daily walking exercise by trying to discover new places to visit nearby and by discovering more about local history. In this endeavor I relied heavily on wiki maps - interactive maps which plot the locations of places featured on Wikipedia.

A great example of a wiki map is NearbyWiki. Share your location with NearbyWiki and it will show you a local map marked with all the interesting places nearby which are listed on Wikipedia. The map also includes a number of features which can greatly aid any intrepid local explorer. 

Click on any of the nearby local markers on the NearbyWiki map and an information window opens with a short excerpt from the location's Wikipedia article. This window also tells you how far this location is from your home (or the location you shared with NearbyWiki). For those users like me using NearbyWiki to plan walks you can bookmark any locations that you are keen on visiting. Each entry also includes a list of other nearby places featured on Wikipedia, making it very easy to discover other places that you can visit on a planned walk.

 

Once upon a time Google Maps itself had a very useful Wikipedia layer. This Google Maps layer was a fantastic way to learn about all the interesting, historical points of interest around your location. It was definitely one of the most useful functions on Google Maps. So Google got rid of it.

Luckily there are a number of other interactive maps like NearbyWiki which can help you learn more about the world around you using information posted to Wikipedia.

Wikimap is another great example of an interactive map of geo-tagged Wikipedia articles. Zoom in on any area of the world on Wikimap and map markers will reveal all the nearby locations which have entries on Wikipedia. Click on any of these markers and you can read a short introduction to the selected point of interest and click-through to read the whole entry on Wikipedia. 

You can also find nearby points of interest using Wiki Atlas. Open up Wiki Atlas and you can again immediately view all the places around you which have a Wikipedia entry. Click on any of the mapped links and you can read the entry directly from the map. 

All the locations with a Wikipedia entry are shown on Wiki Atlas using colored markers. The colors of the markers indicate the category of the Wikipedia entry (culture, geo, society or STEM).  

Like Wiki Atlas and Wiki Map Geopedia can be used to find and read Wikipedia entries about points of interest around any location. Geopedia uses the Wikipedia API to load all the Wikipedia entries for places around a location on an OpenStreetMap based map. Enter a location into the search bar or right-click on the map and markers will show all the Wikipedia entries near your chosen location.

If you want to discover more about nearby points of interest then you can also use Wikimapia. Wikimapia is one of the most successful interactive maps of all time. For over 13 years Wikimapia has provided a great map based resource for discovering information about locations and points of interest around the world.

In essence Wikimapia is a website which lets you describe locations in the same way that Wikipedia allows you to add and edit articles in its wiki database. Like Wikipedia it provides an invaluable resource for researching and discovering information about the world - except with Wikimapia every entry is a real-world location.

To use Wikimapia you just need to search for a location on the map. and click on any of the highlighted areas to discover information about the selected location. For example, if you see an interesting looking building on your daily travels, you just need to click on the building on the Wikimapia map to read its Wikimapia wiki entry.