While in Mumbai last month I stumbled onto a feature for our desktop site that I think would be killer for mobile.
Its the map overlay that we use on English Wikipedia. Where is it? .. well .. unless your determined then your likely not to find it as its not identified very well. To find it
1) Load http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai 2) Wait for about five seconds for it to load (you'd never know) 3) Scroll down to the middle of the info box to the "Coordinates" section 4) Click on the "Globe" icon (the globe .. no the gps coordinates)
You'll be greeted by a really cool map overlay that shows you articles that are near the one that your browsing. You can hover over an icon for a text page preview, click to see the article, and scroll the map to see more pages. I think this is a great start but we can do much better.
And were not the only ones that have thought about this. The German Wikipedia has another really interesting implementation.
1) Load http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai 2) Scroll to "Koordinaten" 3) Click "Karte"
This implementation uses open street maps and has some nice user filters and options.
Now some people might ask. Isn't this the same thing as near by me? Not exactly. The near by me is really meant as its name implies to be a tool that travels with you as you navigate through space. This tool instead allows you to navigate Wikipedia visually rather then textually regardless of where you are. I think both tools could play off of each other very well.
This would be a really powerful way of browsing Wikipedia that would be perfect for touch based devices. With tablets we could add more filters and sub selections options as screen real estate allows. And it would be far move relevant then showing them GeoHack (http://bit.ly/shxI7Y) [1] when they touched a GPS link on a mobile wikipedia page. Think about how we could navigate Wikipedia by just taping each point. Icons for different categories. Colors for articles needing images or general improvement. And so much more.
We know that typing is tough on phones. Lets make it even easier to interact with Wikipedia by making it a touch based activity.
I'm eager to rally some folks from the open street maps community and WMF to tackle this during the SF Hackathon (http://bit.ly/u5EXjM).
Who's in?
[1] https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/GeoHack
--tomasz