Places With the Most Wikipedia Articles

Trepidity writes "Wikipedia has been making an effort to mark up articles with latitude-longitude coordinates when they refer to a specific location. It's now been done for over a million articles (across all languages). I was curious which parts of the world have gotten the most coverage. The answer: Florence, Italy has the most articles within a 1-km-diameter circle; and London tops both the 10-km and 100-km lists. Full results and methodology details are available."

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Who the fuck cares?

I do. I find geo stuff always super-interesting and am grateful that there are people out there who take the effort to analyze this.

Re:who gives a fuck?

[Alef]

I don't know, but some evidently do. May I ask, why do you care who cares?

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[blair1q]

Joe Mama.

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[jhoegl]

I dunno I started thinking about how ...... zzzzzzzzzz

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[Anonymous Coward]

Most likely, those widely referenced location would be the ones with a very dense cultural history/background (hence Florence and London makes perfect sense); so one reason to care: if you're interested in history, art, etc. such a list might give you interesting places to visit (admittedly, those two location are quite an obvious choice).

No point contributing

[syousef]

Every contribution you make gets deleted, or overwritten with less authoritative gibberish. Wikipedia was great about 3-4 years ago and really lived up to the ideal. Now it is a stomping ground for overzealous militant admins who are more interested in exercising their power than improving the site. This has been recognized by far more important people than I. Use to be that one of the top 3 Google results on a large number of topics was Wikipedia. Now you're lucky if it's 10th or 12th. So congrats for taki

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[Wyatt Earp]

I agree about the admins, but the Google ranking argument doesn't hold water.

I just googled a few random items.
"M-1 Abrams" - Wikipedia link was first result
"Strawberry" - Wikipedia link for Golden Strawberry was first result
"Vibrator" - Wikipedia link was fourth link, first non-ad result.
"Mach-3" - Wikipedia link was sixth link for the Gillette Mach3 (the thing I was searching for) after a Google formula for Mach 3 to m/s, four airsoft gun links and shopping block for Mach3 razor blades.

So it still tends t

Re:

[syousef]

It has changed again. For a while it had really dropped. I wonder if they consider Wikipedia when fiddling with pagerank.

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[Anonymous Coward]

The deletionists really piss me off. They've nuked lots of well-written science and computing articles and leave stupid shit about soaps and star trek in all its meandering infantile length.

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[Ihmhi]

I started editing Wikipedia (anonymously) back in like 2004 or 2005 when it was still pretty new.

Back then things were pretty sweet. Anyone could pretty much write up anything and it would eventually evolve into a very well-written article.

Now, because of the delitionists, articles get deleted because they're "not notable" (little or no independent sources cited), because an admin is having a power trip, or for some other altogether arbitrary reason. The bar to write a new article has been greatly raised, a

Florence

[element-o.p.]

The answer: Florence, Italy...

You mean, the sworn enemy of Gildor?!?!

France

[colfer]

France wins on the rural side. Every little commune, some barely populated if at all, has a Wikipedia article, in an example of historical French rationalist completionism meeting early Wikipedian diligence. This is on English Wikipedia.

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[cashman73]

That's nothing. You ever seen all the worthless articles about all of the "census designated places" in the US?

No, Poland

[Len]

If I click "Random Article" a few times, it'll soon come up with a village in Poland - a lot more often than France.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[Forty Two Tenfold]

I'm from Poland and this [wikipedia.org] is not.

Link to actual pages?

[Old Wolf]

Any way of listing which articles are included in the result circle?
For example I'd like to see what the 405 interesting things about Florence are!

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[xaxa]

Try this [google.co.uk], to start. There are probably other map-things that do this too.

A Google search for site:en.wikipedia.org Coordinates "Florence, Italy" gives 370 results.

A neat idea

[tpstigers]

And I get the desire, since location seems to be the latest 'thing'. Their methodology strikes me as being ridiculously overcomplicated, though. Since there are already a slew of open location-based services out there, why not just use one of them (OpenStreetMap springs to mind)?

The power of Wikipedia

[egil]

I had the honour and pleasure of starting this thing. I see the Wikiproject article was created 09:15, 13 February 2005. I made some convention for adding the lat/lon coordinates, which then linked to a small website that had proper link to various map resources (this was before OpenStreetMap). I documented it, then manually added links to a few articles, just to have some critical mass to start it off. After that, it kind of caught on, and now we have a million articles with coordianates, and a whole lot of super mobile phone apps and other applications I could never have imagined.

So you can bash WIkipedia all you want, but to me, this really shows the immense power of Wikipedia.

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[oever]

This approach is incomplete though. It create wrong information. No place is just a spot, it's usually an area, some places are a volume. It would be much better to give users the ability to paint an area on the map instead of just one point.

Some examples:
area where a species lives in summer
area of a country or city (London has coordinates 51Â30â26âN 0Â7â39âW, but it covers an area of 1,579 square kilometers)
area of seas and events.

The notion that articl

True but..

[biodata]

everything is wrong. Pretty much all information is just a model of reality, and I can see that an area or volume based approach might have some advantages. There are a few arguments I can think of against the area approach though. If you painted an area on the map, how would you decide what level of granularity to go down to? Unless you painted the map down the atomic scale it might be 'wrong'. Also the earth is not flat (or round) of course. Plus some people would paint an area and some would choose a

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[oever]

The areas would improve over time by editing. An area or set of areas is, for most topics, an improvement over a single point. Few areas will be perfect, certainly initially, just like the articles themselves are not perfect. But as often, here too perfection is the enemy of success.

Many boundaries are defined by states. In case of disagreement, multiple areas can be mentioned, just like different versions of the facts, with an explanation of the origins, can be present on a Wikipedia page.

The best way forw

Stockholm?

[Pflipp]

Honestly surprised that Stockholm gets mentioned so much. Now I'm intrigued; any suggestions why?

(I still have to plan my holidays...)

Re:

[Carewolf]

Sweden is a very online nation, you will also see Oslo on the list, again Norway is another very online nation but Oslo if a fair bit smaller than Stockholm. Additionally people living in Stockholm has an unusually high concentration of delusional people who truly believe Stockholm is of any real significance.

But, they explain later that the method they used makes the comparison warped towards cities closer to the poles. So that might explain it better than the mad Swedish theory ;)

Boring Oregon

[rossy]

This just proves the need for the non profit "boring initiative" to begin funding articles about Boring Oregon. Every individual needs to be interviewed, historical significance of buildings, which doorknobs were brought in bybwagon train, etc.
A team needs to examine the micro organisms unique to the soil etc. Only megabytes of wikapedia data can keep boring boring.