Google Earth coordinates for all of Wikipedia

Filed under: Fun

Google Earth coordinates for all of Wikipedia

by Jordan Running (RSS feed) Oct 26th 2006 at 11:12AM

You may or may not be aware that Wikipedia contains the geographical coordinates for thousands of cities, landmarks, and other geographical features, and there's an ongoing WikiProject to add latitude and longitude data to every place in the online encyclopedia. This is pretty cool, as it allows you to check out a Wikipedia article and jump straight to a Google Maps satellite view or punch the place into your GPS unit. But wouldn't it be cooler if you could do the opposite, i.e. look at a map and see all the associated Wikipedia articles? You know where I'm going with this--Wikipedia for Google Earth. One clever soul has taken a snapshot of the geocoordinates Wikipedia makes available and put them together as a .KMZ file that you can load into Google Earth. There are tens of thousands of coordinate pairs in the nearly 2MB XML file, but they're all logically separated into layers since seeing them all at once is a tad overwhelming. It's available in both English and German, and uses Google Earth's built-in web browser to display the Wikipedia article when you click on a placemark. Very cool.

[Via Waxy.org]

Tags: coordinates, geocoordinates, google, google earth, GoogleEarth, kml, mapping, maps, reference, wiki, wikipedia

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

D said 12:59PM on 10-26-2006

Not related,... but try this on your google map / google earth!

50° 0'38.20"N 110° 6'48.32"W

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=50%C2%B0+0%2738.20%22N+110%C2%B0+6%2748.32%22W&ie=UTF8&z=17&ll=50.010538,-110.113585&spn=0.004895,0.009978&t=h&om=1

Gnom said 10:59AM on 10-27-2006

Good idea. Google Earth is more better.

kolossos said 4:21AM on 10-29-2006

An other version is to find at:
http://www.alder-digital.de/wiki/index.php/Wikipedia_in_GoogleEarth_%28en%29

It works with a database in the background, so the file is very small.

David Fowler said 3:42PM on 10-29-2006

Many years ago I got excited about GeoURL and did a web experiment where you could enter an IP address and it would return a map (tiger server) with a flag at the spot identified in a CERN db for that IP. The db is not perfect but it was fun to do.

The url is http://www.sidebit.com/index.php/locate-ip/

I wonder if this should be revised to use the Google Map API.

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

View more Time Wasters

Featured Galleries

Defective by Design, London: Protest Pictures

Download Squad at the Crunchies After-Party

Android First-look: Amazon.com MP3 Store

Latest Jobs from Download Squad Jobs

Post a Job

Flickr Pool

www.flickr.com

Download Squad bloggers (30 days)

#	Blogger	Posts	Cmts
1	Jay Hathaway	102	5
2	Lee Mathews	77	22
3	Sebastian Anthony	69	226
4	Brad Linder	32	2
5	Jason Clarke	28	0
6	Paul O'Brien	8	0
7	Grant Robertson	6	3
8	Dolores Parker	6	2
9	Victor Agreda, Jr.	6	1
10	Nik Fletcher	5	0
11	Matt Heerema	3	0
12	John Burke	1	0
13	Download Squad Staff	1	0

More Tech Coverage

Control Shift It's all about the experience
Somewhat Frank Perspectives on tech as it fuses in everyday life
Switched Gadgets, web news and commentary
Urlesque Exposing bits of the web

Download Squad

Google Earth coordinates for all of Wikipedia

Related Articles From Download Squad