Community Wishlist/Wishes/Filters for types of items shown on the Wikipedia app Nearby places map
Description
The restored Nearby feature in the Wikipedia app is very useful. It would be much more useful if one could customize which types of items it displays, for example to hide items about transport like railway stations, schools, and cemeteries which depending on the location can make up most of the items on the map which makes it hard to find places one is interested in like sightseeing-type of notable places when using it to explore a place/city one is not familiar with.
I think the most common use-case is to learn more about known places as well as discover unknown interesting places. In such cases, it would be useful to hide various types of items and these could even be hidden by default. The fewer and the more relevant items there are on the map, the more useful this feature becomes. Currently, it can be cluttered with lots uninteresting items making it difficult to discover relevant items and sometimes even to tap on an item since there are so many – for example when wanting to see only tourism-type-relevant major places nearby.
There could be many enableable filters which could be extended over time (maybe via feedback form); here are some example filter that I think would be very useful:
- Transport infrastructure articles (like railway stations and so on; maybe it would make sense to not include bridges here)
- Low-importance articles (see technical details)
- Schools, cemeteries, political buildings, etc. (separately and maybe underneath a multi-toggle item that un/checks all of them at once)
- Greenspaces like forests, rivers and parks (one could also make it show only these if one wants to view only information about these)
These would simply be unchecked or checked (whatever the default is) in a sidebar of the map view that one can display with a burger menu. This feature could also be used to find only specific items by unchecking all and then making it show the types of articles you're interested in.
Here are some technical details how this could be implemented:
- The Wikipedia category system would be used; so for example for Transport infrastructure items articles in Category:Transport by country would be excluded (this wouldn't be queried each time the map is called but would be cached / stored and regularly updated)
- For being able to exclude low-importance articles, the article importance ratings of relevant WikiProjects (on the Talk pages of the articles) could be used (also see this research project)
- Maybe at a later point this could be better integrated with WikiVoyage (is there a separate mobile app for Wikivoyage?) as well as with articles about certain subjects (for example an article about greenspaces in a region could embed the filtered Places map showing only these particular items so if you browse that article in the app you can use its embedded map like Parks and open spaces in London or List of national nature reserves in England or List of museums in Philadelphia etc.)
Assigned focus area
Unassigned.
Type of wish
Feature request
Related projects
Wikipedia, Wikivoyage
Affected users
Wikipedia app users
Phabricator tasks
Other details
- Created: 16:15, 23 September 2024 (UTC)
- Last updated: 14:18, 25 September 2024 (UTC)
- Author: Prototyperspective (talk)