I'm not sure we'd want to bring in secondary points - I can imagine the real use of Special:Nearby on Wikivoyage is for travellers who are looking for places to go to next that are nearby e.g. by train/bus. Somewhere like London would report Cambridge, Stonehenge or Oxford as being nearby even though they are 60+ miles apart.. yet currently it only shows 8 districts in London.
I imagine something like the in article Nearby pages that we currently have in beta would be a better vehicle for secondary points...
Is there anyway we can guide a volunteer developer to do this and is anyone interested? I'd love to see this moved along and give WV the nearby it deserves.
On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 8:26 AM, Max Semenik msemenik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 6:37 PM, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
Actually my question is about further tweaking this... please reread my email.
D'oh!
So the problem is not in radius but in what to display. https://wikimedia.mingle.thoughtworks.com/projects/mobile/cards/784 discusses how geo search can be made more useful for WV. Our present Nearby implementation that searches for primary coordinaes only is not helpful because the wiki consists of large pages with a lot of POIs around. My current work on porting to Elasticsearch would allow a sane spatial search for secondary coordinates, once it's complete we can experiment with adding a Wikiversity-specific mode for Nearby. With a lot of points around, there should be no need to have a continent-sized radius.