What other kinds of data can be added to articles?
Wikipedia articles can also contain geographic coordinate information, where it is sensible to include it.
By adding coordinates, a Wikipedia reader can easily view the location on a street map, nautical chart, topographic map, by satellite photo, realtime weather map, and many other options. Coordinate data makes an article eventually appear in various services such as Google Maps Wikipedia overlay, Google Earth, and Wikimedia’s map service. (How to add geocodes to articles)
Wikipedia: The Text Adventure is an old fashioned style text based adventure game. Whether a place is available in the game relies on geographical coordinates being included on Wikipedia articles.
- Go to http://kevan.org/wikitext/
- Type Old College, University of Edinburgh
- Start exploring!
Try starting in a few locations you know well. If they aren’t available in the game this will either be because (a) there is no coordinate data associated with the Wikipedia article (b) there is no Wikipedia article at all 🙁
Adding new locations to the game
New locations can be added to the game immediately, by adding coordinate information to Wikipedia articles.
You can use Google Maps to look up coordinates. Zoom right in on the desired location and click What’s here? The coordinates are shown in the search box and you can cut and paste them.
You can use the following template to add coordinates to an article. You will need to switch into the wiki markup editor for this:
{{coords|55.951989| -3.196499|display=title}}
(Example for the Royal Scottish Academy Building in Edinburgh, Scotland)
More Reading
- A programmer turned Wikipedia into a classic text adventure (Ars Technica, 2017)
- Mapping Wikipedia’s augmentations of our planet
- There is also the new Dungeon of Knowledge – another ‘80s throwback where you can navigate through a maze to uncover linked data entities in Wikidata while avoiding the evil Cats chasing after you in this Rogue-like adventure game.
(By The original uploader was MykReeve at English Wikipedia (Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons.) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons)
