WikiLocation a directory of location guides

Heritage · this domain's first life

The WikiLocation geolocation API, 2010 to 2014

By WikiLocation editorial · Facts checked 15 September 2026

If you arrived from a developer blog post that links here for API documentation: the API this domain was named for closed in August 2014. This page says what it was, why it went, and where the same call lives now. The rest of the site is a directory of location guides under new ownership, unrelated to the original project.

What it was

WikiLocation was an unofficial, free REST API written by the mobile developer Ben Dodson. In his own words, "I built WikiLocation in 2010" while "working on an app which needed to fetch Wikipedia articles that were nearby". Given a latitude and longitude, it returned the Wikipedia articles geocoded near that point. ProgrammableWeb's March 2011 write-up describes the method: the Wikipedia database was downloaded weekly, its geocoded entries parsed into a database, and served over REST in XML, JSON or JSONP; at that time it covered 36 languages and more than 3.8 million articles, and could also be queried by Foursquare and Gowalla venue IDs and by Yahoo WOEID.

Why it closed

On 19 August 2014 Dodson retired it together with TubeUpdates. The post gives two reasons: a hosting change that "killed my infrastructure", and cost, since "donations for the service from those who have used it haven't covered a single week of the hosting I've been paying for over the last 4 years". From that day "the API will now return a 404 error for all endpoints". The api.wikilocation.org host has been dead since; this site does not resurrect it.

What to use instead

Dodson pointed users to "the official API from Wikipedia". That is the GeoData extension's geosearch module of the MediaWiki action API: a request of the form 

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=geosearch&gscoord=32.7157|-117.1611&gsradius=10000&gslimit=20&format=json

returns pages within a radius of a coordinate, with titles, page IDs and distances. It runs per language edition (swap en for pt, de and so on), which is the one thing WikiLocation did in a single call. The MediaWiki page linked below carries the parameters; it is the maintained reference, and this page is not.

What this page replaces

Between 2023 and 2026 this address carried a page presenting three "documentation clusters" (Wikipedia API, Geolocation API, Foursquare API) under an invented author. It described no product of this domain. It has been replaced by this account, and the surviving articles from that period are listed below as archive pieces, with their original dates, for anyone who linked to them. They are general introductions, not documentation of the WikiLocation API.

If you maintain a link here

Keep it if your post is about the history of location APIs; this page will stay at this address. Point it at the MediaWiki geosearch page if your readers want a working endpoint. Corrections to the account above: see the editorial policy.

Sources and last verified