Discussion
Someone Made Wikipedia for Just Your Neighborhood...
Ed Jefferson built a site that shows you Wikipedia, but only the parts you could walk to. Local Wikipedia describes itself as "Wikipedia, but only for things a half hour walk from you."
It works because a lot of Wikipedia already knows where it is. The site uses geocoded pages only, pulled from Wikipedia's geosearch, which MediaWiki documents as a search "for articles around the given point."
Another found local schools "and then a cold war nuclear bunker that I didn't know about." I would very much like to know where my nearest bunker is, thanks.
That same thread had a fair warning. The half-hour walk is a straight-line circle, so a river or a wall between you and an article doesn't count against it. Your location is handled in one line on the site: "Your location stays in this browser: links you share don't include it."
This is very much Jefferson's kind of project.
According to Ed Jefferson's site, he makes internet-powered interactive things and writes for The Guardian, Time Out and the New Statesman, and one of his earlier toys describes any location on Earth by listing nine actors who have played Doctor Who.
Try it on your own street first, then on the street where you grew up. You'll probably learn something about both, and you might find a story worth telling your neighbors.
Your neighborhood already has a Wikipedia page. It was just scattered.
The script behind Local Wikipedia sets that half-hour walk at 1.5 miles. If fewer than 25 things are that close, it reaches out to the nearest 25 within about six miles, and it stops at 500 (sorry, downtown Manhattan).
The fun is in what people turn up. On Hacker News, one commenter hit "random article" three times and got "three weird stories I didn't know about the history of places within a few blocks of me in Portland, Oregon."