Kevin Yang wrote:

Hello ,

i am trying to develop a mobile wikipedia product which utilize the 

GPS data. I noticed that google maps have a button "more -> wikipedia" which will show wikipedia articles near a specific location . I am curious how that works?

Any tips/answers are highly appreciated. Thanks.

Wikipedia articles are geotagted usint the template {{coord}}http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Coord

Google maps parses the database dumpshttp://download.wikimedia.org/ to extract the locations. It was explained on wikitech-l, see the archives.

You can also see other implementations, such as http://toolserver.org/~dschwen/wikiminiatlas/ on the toolserver and in general the related toolshttp://toolserver.org/~interiot/cgi-bin/tstoc?sortby=hits&tag=geo

The mediawiki api does not expose this data, but you may contact with para or Dschwen as to how to query their tools for your app.