Local Wikipedia: Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you (edjefferson.com)

delichon 1 day ago

• ASalazarMX 1 day ago

  I await with bated breath the entry about that ergonomic log.

• etewiah 1 day ago

  I have just the thing for you. With a chattymap collection, you can tell stories about all those wonderful places and share them with the world:

  https://chattymaps.com/collections

  • allthetime 1 day ago

    Your description excited me to click the link. Then I was met with a generic landing page and then clicking map didn’t show me a map. It should just be a map with the stories immediately available as markers. Then clicking through to an about link should take you to that secondary content.

    • CobrastanJorji 1 day ago

      I agree. What I expected was a place for very personal little stories and journals about specific, hyperlocal spots on Earth. What I got was an empty site for public polls on restaurants in large cities.

    • etewiah 1 day ago

      That is good feedback - much appreciated.

      There isn't enough content to showcase on the map right now but I'll work on that. Give it another go in a couple of weeks or so.

      • allthetime 1 day ago

        You could seed the map by scraping things like local papers, historical archives, reviews of all kinds, etc. maybe giving them a less prominent appearance compared to user submitted. Getting people using and exploring the tool right away instead of being met with walls of copy and detached forums might be a good move. You could pull the old reddit move and spend a few days adding a tonne of your own stories under different names and/or try and find some others that would be interested in doing the same. Others here would probably tell you to just use LLMs, but I'd avoid that.

        As it stands I think you will have a hard time getting people to start filling your database.

        • etewiah 1 day ago

          My plan is indeed to seed some initial data from areas that I know well.

          I'm quite into paddle boarding at the moment and in the UK there are a lot of good places to launch from that are not well known so that would be a good niche to start with.

  • dtjohnnymonkey 3 hours ago

    I love this idea. Every time I go on a road trip I wish I could just tune into some audio clips about local stories as I'm driving by.

• ek_erilaz 1 day ago

  I wonder if its more common to notice interesting and special places when in nature versus in the built environment. All of your examples are from nature, and most of mine would be too. But considering it further... in college there was a nook I found on the second floor of a nondescript building, where lounge chairs were built into the floor and covered with astroturf, and at just after midday the sun would shine down on it through a sort of compluvium in the roof. I'd been on that campus for almost three years before I discovered it, and only visited a few times because it was quite out of the way. But what a quiet little refuge, I hope its still there.

  • rsynnott 1 day ago

    And then there's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperart_Thomasson

• carterpaul 1 day ago

  This reads like an excerpt from Piranesi by Susanna Clark

  • jimbokun 1 day ago

    Just looked at the Piranesi Wikipedia page. The description reminds me of the Heaven Sent episode of Dr Who.

• Facemelters 1 day ago

  Atlas Obscura is your answer to this: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/all-places-in-the-atla...

• samtp 1 day ago

  There is not even an entry for a river, mountain, lake, etc? Do you live in the middle of the ocean or desert?

• rhipitr 1 day ago

  Part of me would want to share these pleasant places with others. Part of me would not.

• skinfaxi 1 day ago

  As first-hand accounts I don't think you could enter these on Wikipedia anyway.

• zahlman 1 day ago

  Indeed. The project in the OP is nonsensical to me, because it's impossible to get the desired result by filtering the real Wikipedia. The articles you'd actually want it to have would blatantly violate WP:N, WP:NPOV and especially WP:NOR.

• awesome_dude 1 day ago

  > To the northeast is the spot where I found a perfect arrowhead

  You live in an area rich with history stretching back 35 - 50 thousand years

• ant6n 1 day ago

  I live in the middle of Berlin. This makes the wiki like a sight seeing book. I think the radius is way too big here.

• gib444 1 day ago

  Do you have a spare bedroom on Airbnb? Asking for a friend

• lifeformed 1 day ago

  Citation needed.

nomilk 1 day ago

• benrutter 1 day ago

  I don't know if that is a psychological quirk - it seems pretty rational to me. We are more affected by events that happen close to us than those that happen far away, so instinctively finding local events more interesting than distant ones seems like what I'd expect[0].

  [0] Not that my expectation has any weight, I have close to zero knowledge of psychology.

  • hobofan 1 day ago

    Unless you are in a highly urban area, most Wiki articles will be about _places_ and sometimes _events at the places_, but usually not _events_ themselves.

    For things that affect people, I think the impact of the recency axis is significantly larger than the one of the geographical axis. e.g. I feel the effects of the Iran war in my daily consumer prices in my daily life. I don't feel the effects of a famous person being born two doors down from my place 200 years ago in my daily live.

    Of course highly local things, like e.g. local politics are also felt, but those are also barely reflected in Wikipedia articles.

  • deklesen 1 day ago

    Mhh i wonder how this would have evolved, since, you know, for 99.99% of time, humans didn't really get any information other than from their immediate proximity. And if they did (e.g. earthquake), it was very much relevant and should affect them.

    Just flaunting my ignorance of biology here.

    • benrutter 1 day ago

      I'm at least a tiny bit less ignorant on biology than psychology. I don't think this is the kind of thing that does evolve.

      Normally more general capacities than that evolve. We've evolved the ability to learn and adapt, and that's what we're using to create these heuristics. But I don't people evolve into individual beliefs/attitudes in that way.

    • altmanaltman 1 day ago

      I mean, it's the brain, not the world around it. Our brains haven't really evolved much while civilization and technology have been growthmaxxing. Same reason why certain social media posts can trigger a physical, emotional reaction, even though for 99.99% of the time there were no cellphones or social media.

• dspillett 1 day ago

  I think¹ it is more likely just a function of how we judge danger. Something local could be relevant to us now (if it were ongoing, or was likely to occur again, or affects/affected someone we care about), something far away might be relevant to us later. Nearby or approaching animal sounds? Definitely pay attention. More distant animal sounds? Maybe keep an ear on that. A tale of animal sounds in the next valley? Only take much note if it is part of an otherwise interesting/entertaining story.

  --------

  [1] caveat: I am in no way a biologist, sociologist, nor psychiatrist - this pondering may be complete bunkum

• PebblesRox 1 day ago

  It was a really strange feeling to read through Asimov and get to Robots and Empire, where the story, having ranged throughout a galactic empire in the far-flung future, follows the characters not just to Earth but to Three Mile Island — a place I had seen before! A place less than an hour a way from my hometown! It made the story feel more connected to my own life in a way that I was not expecting.

• perfectritone 1 day ago

  Anecdotal: I felt much more connected to Kurt Vonnegut's writing knowing that I had walked the same streets as him. The cultural aspects of his characters hit differently being able to match it to people I had met in similar places, albeit at different times.

• dgunay 1 day ago

  Definitely. I read a few articles top to bottom that I normally wouldn't have even bothered to look up on real Wikipedia, learned some cool local lore.

• IAmBroom 1 day ago

  I think it's an odd side-effect of our built-in prejudice to value our tribe over strangers, which is a safety feature in all social animals.

  "A plane crash in <other country> killed all passengers, including 2 from <our country>" is a fairly common news styling.

• cryzinger 1 day ago

  One of the nearest articles to me is also a random plane crash, lol.

• tannertech 1 day ago

  There is a Stalin quote to this effect

• shevy-java 1 day ago

  > otherwise banal articles

  I don't think it is quite banal. The focus is on distance, with distance being local. There is IMO nothing banal about that. And the article linked in is minimal rather than banal. (Also good thing you did not forget the 'b' there.)

  You can of course assume everything to have a manipulative focus, but I don't see it here.

esperent 1 day ago