Find Wikipedia Entries Near You That Are Missing An Image

The very first app I ever built for iOS was an app where you could push a button and it would generate a random celebrity for you.

I used only images in Wikipedia, and at the time, the vast majority of quality images of celebrities were from people who went to a convention or premiere, snapped a bunch of photos of as many famous people as possible, and then uploaded them to the public domain.

These are unsung heroes, as far as I'm concerned.

I always admired these people and thought maybe one day I would contribute to Wikipedia in this way.

So I used ChatGPT 4o to whip up a script that allows a user to provide a set of geo-coordinates and it'll return a list of the closest Wikipedia entries which are missing photos.

Here's a link to the HTML that got spit out. Feel free to take the source code and modify it. Or feel free to look up your own geo-coordinates and give it a spin.

The next time you are out on a walk in your neighborhood and you come across a park that you recall is missing an image, you can pull out your phone, snap a photo of it, and take ten minutes to release it into the public domain so other dorks in the future can see what your neighborhood looks like.

And by the way: I know that if I didn't have a large language model, there's no chance I'd be sitting here at 11pm looking up API documentation to try and figure out how I would put this dumb idea to use. This is the power of LLMs, people. This blog post took roughly three times as long to write than the code that was written.

I did have to refine the output once, and there's clearly no great error handling, and some of the entries it returns do have a photo yadda yadda. I get it.

This isn't a tool that one uses to produce artisanal, well-crafted software that will stand the test of time.

This is a tool that, in roughly 5 minutes, empowered me with information that I can now use to make my community a tiny bit better.

That's what I love about technology.