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Find Wikipedia photos needed near you
- iqkznnft 4y agoI don't get it. I thought this was about Wikipedia wanting pictures, but clicking around most of those locations already have pictures.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y agoIs there a way to manually enter my location? As a general rule, I don't allow websites to know my location.
- simonklitj 4y agoSeems you can do it through the url: https://wikishootme.toolforge.org/#lat=XXX&lng=YYY&zoom=15 https://wikishootme.toolforge.org/#lat=XXX&lng=YYY&zoom=15
- hilyen 4y agoCame to say this, I have GPS disabled globally on my laptop.
- astrange 4y agoBut if you enter your location, then it will know it. (The better privacy solution here vs all or nothing is for browsers to have an option to only provide imprecise locations.)
- fortran77 4y agoCan you make an exception to your "general rule" for a website that explains why it uses your location?
- kixiQu 4y agoYes, with the search icon after you decline (took me a while to figure out too!)
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- Overtonwindow 4y ago“You need to log into your MediaWiki account to authorize applications to access it.”
- electric_mayhem 4y agoNice idea, and I’d consider actually getting some photos to help. But I feel like requiring a login makes it a nope.
- thematrixturtle 4y agoYou can't upload images to Wikipedia without a login. There is also no validation whatsoever on Wikipedia accounts, email verification etc is not required. If you're worried about trusting toolforge.org, it's run by Wikimedia, the organization behind Wikipedia.
- bawolff 4y agoIt should be noted that toolforge tools are run by volunteers, and are subject to a different privacy policy than the main wikimedia sites (that said, they are not allowed to do shady things). You should only need an account on wikipedia not toolforge. Blame all the people who keep uploading pirated movies.
- dylan604 4y ago>they are not allowed to do shady things Well then, if not being allowed is the thing that protects us from harm, we're all saved!! /s
- abbe98 4y agoPeople are vetted before being able to use Tool Forge servers and all hosted code is public.
- bawolff 4y ago"Vetted" is a bit of an exageration (its pretty easy to get an account. Sure technically there is a process, but its an easy one). Basically you can't openly be evil, and if someone discovers that somebody is being evil they get kicked out. Also i think there is a proxy so you can't easily collect ip addresses. So its a step above some random website, but ultimately its closer to a third party site then it is to being real wikipedia. Given you are all on hackernews which is basically a link aggregator for random websites, there is really no reason for this to give anyone pause.
- cyode 4y ago+1 re the login/location gripes. Also, I immediately thought this would violate Wikipedia's "No original research" policy, but looks like images are exempt[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research#Original_images https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research...
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- soared 4y agoWhat is the difference between wikidata and Wikipedia? Most of the red circles near me have a wikidata page, with no data, and no Wikipedia page. Plus to be honest 100% of them are business so I’m not terribly inclined to do their seo for them.
- Gigachad 4y agoWiki data is meant to be some universal facts source that things like voice assistants to tap in to. Answering things like “how tall is Obama”. Wikipedia has much stricter restrictions on “notability” so most businesses won’t quality for a Wikipedia page but would be accepted on wiki data.
- duskwuff 4y agoWikipedia is primarily text, with some semi-structured data. Wikidata is all structured data.
- dhx 4y agoWikidata is very inclusive. If there is a reliable public record of a thing existing (at the extreme end of the scale would be a park bench, tree, light pole) then it could be included. Wikipedia is quite selective with content included, generally requiring multiple public records documenting the thing, and for the thing to be something that the Wikipedia bureaucracy deem to be important enough to justify an article. Hence Wikidata could have an item for every memorial park bench listed at [1] but Wikipedia just has a single page [1] describing what a typical memorial park bench is, and providing some examples either in list format or as a gallery of photos from Wikimedia Commons. Wikidata items for the memorial park benches could have properties for coordinates, official name, person or thing commemorated, date of construction, area the bench resides (e.g. park), length, height, width, construction material, identifiers assigned by heritage or government bodies, artist who designed it, benefactors who funded it, links to significant events related to the bench (e.g. used in a movie), etc. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_bench https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_bench
- viraptor 4y ago> at the extreme end of the scale would be a park bench, tree, light pole Or a truck. Apparently someone in my town is obsessed with cataloguing all the trucks owned / parked in the area.
- soared 4y agoIt would see some analysis of overlapping red and green circles (or image titles) would be beneficial. Near me there are quite a few existing green circles but also a red circle asking for the same picture.
- function_seven 4y agoI get a blank screen with no way (that I can discover) of entering my location. I tried clicking the spyglass icon and entering my city. But just blank results on that as well. Anyone know what this does?
- _jal 4y agoIf you don't allow automatic location detection, it just breaks. Sort of a pattern with Wikipedia... every time I've attempted to assist with something, it turns out they don't like how I do things. So I don't.
- cptskippy 4y agoIt sort of breaks. If you search for something the map will load around Denmark, at which point you can zoom out and manually navigate to any location.
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- marc_abonce 4y agoI manually set my city's coordinates in the URL and that worked. But you have to open the page in a new tab if you do that. For example: https://wikishootme.toolforge.org/#lat=20.59366039765542&lng=-100.39216518402101&zoom=15 https://wikishootme.toolforge.org/#lat=20.59366039765542&lng...
- mkl 4y agoI had to wait quite a while for the search results to appear, so I thought it was broken at first.
- Liquid_Fire 4y ago> I tried clicking the spyglass icon and entering my city. But just blank results on that as well. I got blank results as well, but just blindly clicked on the first result and it went to the correct place (YMMV).
- Gigachad 4y agoI have in the past updated photos on Wikipedia. A lot have photos from 10+ years ago which can be massively outdated.
- thomgo 4y agoCool tool! But the hijacking of the back button on mobile is quite annoying
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- pvg 4y agoPlease don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jeena 4y agoIt asks me for pictures of Elementary Schools and Middle Schools in my area. It's a nope from me, don't want to get arrested by taking pictures there.
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- throwaway2016a 4y agoInteresting. Though a lot of the pages near me only exist on non-English Wikipedia (which is interesting since I'm in the United States). I'm not sure how many people where English is not the primary language will be searching for a tiny dam or bridge in a mid-sized city in New England. I'd want to make sure my photo has impact before I spend time driving to the location and taking one.
- cptskippy 4y agoI had the same experience. There's an old quarry near my home and there's a Wikipedia article written in Cebuano about it. It seems to have been auto-generated from public data using the DotNetWikiBot.
- bawolff 4y agoIf its a landmark,having a freely licensed photo of it can still be very useful, even if no wikipedia article exists for it.
- raybb 4y agoDo you have any examples of how photos with location are currently being used? I'm all for Wikipedia and sites having this kind of data to build on. But who already built on it?
- bawolff 4y agoI was thinking more small scale. Someone wants to make an educational youtube video about some obscure landmark and needs a picture but doesn't want to get copyright struck.
- esperent 4y agoSame, I'm in Vietnam but most of the pictures seem to link to Spanish Wikipedia which, apparently, has an exhaustive range of articles on beaches around the world. It could be that other languages are restrictive than English Wikipedia which is notoriously strict on what articles they allow.
- MartijnBraam 4y agoIf I look in my region it is absolutely filled with requests of pictures of every single street and canal making it very hard to find something that's actually worth taking a picture of.
- oefnak 4y agoMe too. Maybe a Dutch bot created articles for every street?
- tuukkah 4y agoNot necessarily Wikipedia articles but Wikidata items.
- gberger 4y agoWhy isn't a street or canal worth taking a picture of? What are the kind of things you expected to be asked to take pictures of?
- daleharvey 4y agoThings on Wikipedia (ie not every single street or canal)
- MartijnBraam 4y agoThere are notable buildings here, some statues. Not sure why you want to have a picture of a random street where some people live, I mean the privacy issues alone. At that point use streetview.
- karmelapple 4y agoThanks for doing this! I am going to contribute some photos soon, I've added a todo for this weekend. Plenty of red circles near me, and it will encourage me to see some new places in my area.
- thcipriani 4y agoTo be clear, I (OP) did not do this—I just found this. This is a Magnus Manske[0] joint[1]. [0]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Manske https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnus_Manske> [1]: <https://bitbucket.org/magnusmanske/wikishootme https://bitbucket.org/magnusmanske/wikishootme>
- MarcelOlsz 4y agoThis is perfect for when I get my eBike. Bookmarked.
- spinaltap 4y agoI'm confused about wikidata vs wikipedia - I'm surprised by the large number of dots near me, I thought every dot was related to a wikipedia article, then I clicked on the dots and realized they were wikidata, not wikipedia
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- bawolff 4y agoWikipedia is prose articles Wikidata is a semantic web thing to collect facts about the world in a machine readable way (e.g. queryable via https://query.wikidata.org https://query.wikidata.org ) Generally speaking, wikidata is more broad than wikipedia.
- jleedev 4y agoThere are 239 Wikipedia articles about Barack Obama, but only one Wikidata concept. Comes in handy when updating the interwiki language links, or being able to automatically fill out those infoboxes.
- shp0ngle 4y agoI have a personal opinion that might not be popular Wikipedia is actual encyclopedia and useful Wikidata is a weird idea to create a weird “semantic web” - a hierarchy of everything that ever existed or will exist - and it’s about as useful and easy to understand as previous experiments with semantic web. Wikimedia seems to double down on this instead of letting it die; I really don’t understand the point, I don’t think that it’s useful and it’s really hard to edit, as a editor. Interesting thing is - it’s CC0 instead of creative commons for some reason. Their argument is that you cannot copyright a fact. I donno.
- bawolff 4y agoWeird take when wikidata has 117% year-over-year page view growth. The audience is quite different, and it may very well not be useful to you, and that is ok, but wikidata clearly has an audience and seems to be on an upswing. Its certainly doing better than pretty much all the other sister projects. As an aside, politically wikidata is really WM-DE's baby, so its really more them doubling down and WMF along for the ride, but of course its all very intertwined.
- SMAAART 4y agoI don't get it. What's the difference between red dots, blue dots, and green dots?
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- mtmail 4y agohttps://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiShootMe https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiShootMe * larger, green circles represent Wikidata items with an image * larger, red circles represent Wikidata items without an image * smaller, blue circles represent Commons images * smaller, yellow circles represent Wikipedia articles, in the current language edition
- pimlottc 4y agoThere really ought to be a map legend on the page itself. EDIT: After reading the documentation page [0] linked in another comment, I see that there is legend in the "layers" popup on the upper-right. It did not at all occur to me to look in this location; I would have guessed that this icon let me change the underlying map tiles (e.g. transit, traffic, topography, etc). 0: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiShootMe https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiShootMe
- aaron695 4y ago
- webel0 4y agoNeat concept! Sounds like a great way to explore a place beyond tourist spots.
- irrational 4y agoHoly browser hijacking Batman! It’s impossible to use your back button once you go to the site. I’m amazed that someone added photos of every single park nearby, no matter how small.
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- shp0ngle 4y agonot wikipedia; but wikimedia commons. A bit of a difference.
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- xvilka 4y agoI stopped to contribute to Wikipedia after they banned edit access from VPN services, even if you are logged in, your account is old, and has no spam history in the past.
- jiggawatts 4y agoWhy would that matter if they have HTTPS?
- nnoitra 4y agoWhat's the best way to see recent pictures based on geographics location? IG? I'm asking because I thought this would be automized. I'm suprised it's not!
- duxup 4y agoI feel like letting you search and see if there are any needed photos would prompt folks to then log in, rather than require a log in to just search.
- mrfusion 4y agoWill a standard upload strip my exif data? I don’t want anyone to know my lens size.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thamer 4y agoSome EXIF data is displayed, this page covers the topic: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Exif https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Exif Here's an example of a photo that was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, with extensive EXIF metadata: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giza_pyramids_and_Khufu_boat_pit_2.jpg#metadata https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giza_pyramids_and_Kh... To hide your lens size you you can always strip the metadata before you upload, e.g. with ImageMagick: convert original.jpg -strip output.jpg
- formerkrogemp 4y agoRelevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/631/ https://xkcd.com/631/
- totetsu 4y agoNSFW
- lukeholder 4y agoThis is so awesome, I just discovered the large rock feature near the highway about 200 meters from my house is called "Chipper's Leap" where in 1832 John Chipper jumped from the rock while trying to escape an attack by a party of Noongars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chippers_Leap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chippers_Leap
- softgrow 4y agoThe tool is useful, but let down by Wikipedia images not being linked to the relevant Wikidata ID. I selected just the red circles (no photo). About half of these already have photos in the Wikipedia article that isn't linked to the Wikidata ID. Adding the image attribute to the Wikidata fixes it and the red dot disappears about 60 seconds later. So before you head out with your camera, perhaps do some linking first. What's left surprises me with articles with no photo, which I would have thought someone would have done by now. So I'll be the first!
- thrdbndndn 4y agoHijacking the top comment to make it more clear since lots of comments here seem confused: This map mainly shows Wikidata items, in addition to some "orphan" images on Wikimedia Commons (a free media repo from Wikimedia foundation, mainly for used on Wikipedia but not exclusively), both are not technically the same as "Wikipedia" articles. - Red dot: wikidata item without photo - Green dot: wikidata item with photo - Blue dot: Commons images without a wikidata link (keep in mind not all images need to have a link; some are just too trivial to have any wikidata item.) It doesn't directly show Wikipedia articles around you. But Wikipedia has that feature built-in (albeit not an map): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby Edit: it looks like it does have Wikipedia articles as well in some small yellow dots.
- tuukkah 4y ago> not all images need to have a link; some are just too trivial to have any wikidata item. Only the most representative image(s) should be linked from the Wikidata item. More precise properties also exist, e.g. you can separately link an interior image of a building or a tombstone image of a historical person. OTOH, all images can link to all the Wikidata items they depict. This is using Structured Data on Commons which is basically an extension dataset linking images to what they depict: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data Introduction video: https://youtu.be/lmWmMIuCJVM https://youtu.be/lmWmMIuCJVM
- ALittleLight 4y ago
- Markoff 4y agoAnd how much will they pay me for this work? Considering they have tons of money to spend on things unrelated to Wikipedia, yet each year asking for more in their puppy eyes boss scam.
- Tepix 4y agoI consider Wikipedia to be one of the crowning achievements of the Internet, this isn't my worry at all (despite being annoyed by their funding campaigns, too)
- Rebelgecko 4y agoThis is really neat, just as a way to visualize things near me with Wikipedia articles (even if many of them are buildings that don't exist any more). It's also interesting to see where the articles exist. For example a random building near me that was built in 1910 and burned down in 1913 has articles about it in English (not surprising since it was in Los Angeles) and Croatian (somewhat surprising)
- Krasnol 4y agoOr just use the Commons Mobile App: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Mobile_app https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Mobile_app It has the "near you" feature, you can shoot a photo with your phone and upload it with the app too.
- edwcross 4y agoI tried using it several times in recent years, and whenever trying to upload files, I had lots of issues. Filed some bugs, never got them resolved, and ended up giving up after several of my photos and descriptions were lost (or never properly uploaded). I really want the Commons Mobile app to work, and I don't know why it always failed with my Pixel phone, but it was a really frustrating experience.
- tuukkah 4y agoI had the same experience earlier but recently (perhaps within a year) the app has improved significantly.
- nostromo 4y agoIt seems a number of commenters don’t know that Wikipedia has a built-in page to show you articles with subjects near you. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Nearby
- esperent 4y agoSeems like the range is fixed at 10km which gives me a total of 5 articles, none of them very interesting - and besides, I'm quite familiar with my area in that range. Would be nice to be able to expand it so that I could discover interesting things a little further out but still in easy driving distance.
- jsmith99 4y agoIt isn't customisable but doesn't seem fixed. I got about 55 articles, all within 1.7km.
- bawolff 4y agoApi version is customizable, but looks like api limits to at most 10 km https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query%2Bgeosearch https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query... (Probably possible to do a sparql query for this at https://query.wikidata.org https://query.wikidata.org but seems like it would be complicated, at least given my relatively novice level of sparql skills)
- account42 4y agoBoth TFA and your wikipedia special page rely on location access without any fallback for specifying a location if you don't want to give them your real location (or at least not to the precision that GPS allows) or if your are on a desktop where no location info is available. Disappointing.
- ptilt 4y agoYou can enter manually the GPS coordinate in the URL for the wikipedia nearby page.
- Yenrabbit 4y agoFun discovery: some of my own pictures are up there around my house! I've documented hundreds of species in my garden using iNaturalist, with all photos CC0 in the hopes that they'll be useful to someone. Neat to see that some at least are getting found and used :)
- bloak 4y ago"User denied the request for Geolocation." Would it be easy to make this tool work for people who don't want to mess around with browser settings? Or would it be easier for me to learn how to tell the browser where I am?
- mattgibson 4y agoIP geolocation is horribly inaccurate in my area. Why not let the user specify where they are manually?
- mkl 4y agoYes, it definitely needs a fallback for browsers that have no idea where they are. That would also make "Find Wikipedia photos needed near where you are going to be" possible. Edit: The search icon more or less works, but just showing a navigable map would make much more sense.
- caymanjim 4y agoIt needs a manual entry method. In the US, I'd use zip codes. Lat/lon would work anywhere. I don't share my location except under duress.
- quickthrower2 4y agoAmazing. There are dozens a short walk from me.
- fleddr 4y agoA word on Creative Common licenses: Wikipedia only considers CC0, CC-BY and CC-BY-SA licenses free enough for the image to be included without any issues. With these licenses, you could also add images to Wikipedia that are not your own, which would greatly speed up coverage. I'm specifically mentioning this because some CC licenses seem permissive, but are not permissive enough for Wikipedia. A key example of this is iNaturalist, which contains millions of photos of all kinds of species that would be useful to add to Wikipedia articles. Their default license is CC-BY-NC. Most photographers on that platform just leave it to that default unaware or not interested in licensing in the first place. Some might be aware of this default license and think they're being permissive and generous, making possible exactly sharing across services like Wikipedia. Unfortunately, no. It's a painful mismatch as many of those photographers would likely be perfectly fine with the image being used in that context, but the Wikipedia license requirements prevent this. Similarly, even a license containing an attribution requirement (which is morally perfectly reasonable) is problematic. You find a photo from user "anon2522" on platform X that last posted 8 years ago. The attribution information is really soft and fragile, it doesn't really link to an actual person and the little information you have may disappear at any time. Bottom line, if you're truly creating an image "for the good of the world", CC0 is highly recommended. You can still attribute yourself in EXIF or as a small stamp on the photo itself.
- ceejayoz 4y ago> You find a photo from user "anon2522" on platform X that last posted 8 years ago. The attribution information is really soft and fragile, it doesn't really link to an actual person and the little information you have may disappear at any time. Is this really a problem? We've found stone tablets with authors' names on them from thousands of years ago; they're attributed, even if we know nothing else about their authors. CC-BY doesn't require being able to track down the person to be useful.
- fleddr 4y agoYou're right, I should have worded the attribution problem more clearly. https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_attribution https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/Best_practices_for_att... Yes, in general you can conclude that attribution is not a hard science, you attribute the best you can given available information. But even then there's painful gotchas as described in the article above. The real problem I was aiming at is that it doesn't scale in the context of mass improvement of Wikipedia articles. Say I'm an enthusiast regarding species of fly found in NorthEast America. There's thousands of species and we have thousands of Wikipedia stub articles lacking an image. Next, I found a source containing said images and want to use them. One would now have to go through every single source image and do attribution to the best of our ability. Is there a title? Mandatory to use. No title? Make up your own. Is a license included? If so, 3.0 or 4.0? Is the author mentioned? If yes, does the author want to be mentioned by their real name? Has the author included any other custom requests? You need to honor them. And so on. It's incredible laboursome work if you take on the task of doing it properly. As a result, many may not bother to improve Wikipedia images on such scale. Now imagine those images being CC0. You can skip every single step and be a 100 times more productive. Blunt statement, but the most useful images licenses are "copyrighted" and "CC0". Any license "in between" is messy, not as permissive as you may think, and in many use cases (such as social media) their license terms are fully ignored anyway.
- wasmitnetzen 4y agoThere's a school next door, and the school (the building) has a picture, but the school (the administrative unit) does not have one, even though the school (the administrative unit) is listed as residing in the school (the building). So this tool shows that the school (the administrative unit) is missing a picture.
- rado 4y agoAuthorize doesn't work (Safari)
- stewx 4y agoI see a blank white page. Is it just me?
- cm-t 4y agoThis would be cool to be added to street complete :) (i know it's a different project, but, I suppose same profil user)
- causi 4y agoRather it's "find wikidata photos needed near you". None of the stuff near me is remotely significant enough to have its own article. I don't understand why anyone at Wikipedia is interested in storing photos of such things as unused twenty foot fishing ponds and tiny back yard creeks.