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May 02

Explore Wikipedia with Live Maps

You may have noticed that many articles in Wikipedia are location specific and the coordinate that tiesimage the article to a place on earth appears in the upper right corner. For instance, have a look at the Wikipedia article for Temple of Concord and take note of the coordinates link at the upper right corner of the page. If you click it you are taken to a page where you can view a map of the location of the Temple to provide geographic context to the article you are reading. This is an easy way to see the geography for an individual article, but what if you want to go the other way? what if you are interested in a particular geography and want to see all of the Wikipedia articles in the region?

We've been indexing all of them in our Spatial Search and Explore indexes making it easy to now surf Wikipedia on a map in your browser. to try it out, just turn on Live Map's 'Explore feature and then select the Wikipedia Tag. Try it out! This link will take you to Rome with the Wikipedia layer turned on. As you drag the map, the layer will continuously refresh. You can turn on Explore at ay time by going to the Collections --> Explore  menu in Live Maps.  image

Turn on Birds Eye view for an amazing visual exploration experience. Each pin on the map represents a Wikipedia article. Hover over each for details and a link to open the full article at Wikipedia.
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You can also turn on Explore after doing a Place search. For example, after a search for Mumbai you can click the Explore link in the result panel to dive right in.

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At that point you are presented with information from all across the Geoweb. Be sure to select the Wikipedia tag in the tag list if all you want to see is Wikipedia articles.

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Have fun. and be careful - its addicting Exploring Wikipedia this way and will eat up many hours.

Oh! one more thing. in addition to Explore, you can search for these Wikipedia articles as well. Enter your search phrase and make sure you are on the Collections Scope, then hit search.

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