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Allow user profiles to store geographical user location
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Description

Feature summary (what you would like to be able to do and where):
I want an optional "Location" parameter that you can optionally fill out as part of your user profile. You can be very specific about your location such as your address or just select the city/region you are part of. You can see that GitHub easily allows you to do this:

imagen.png (358×493 px, 27 KB)

The difference would be that instead of being a free text field like in GitHub, it would be a link to a coordinate or actual geographic feature like in OpenStreetMap so that the data is usable.

You could then decide how you want your location to be shown. For example, to all users or only to users who are close to your location or other options.

Users could then see a map of all the Wikimedians in their area and send out mass-messages to organize meetups.

Use case(s) (list the steps that you performed to discover that problem, and describe the actual underlying problem which you want to solve. Do not describe only a solution):

  • I want to see what other Wikimedians are in my area.
  • I want to be able to easily contact these Wikimedians and organize meetups.

Benefits (why should this be implemented?):
A dedicated location parameter will let easily let users give their location without requiring finding, maybe creating, and then adding a user box to their profile. This will especially help beginner Wikimedians who might not know how userboxes work and just eliminates the technical nightmare of organizing location data with userboxes.

Event Timeline

Aklapper triaged this task as Lowest priority.Sep 5 2022, 8:27 PM
Aklapper edited projects, added MediaWiki-User-management; removed MediaWiki-General.

Note that this may decrease privacy of users. Have other Wikimedia folks somewhere expressed interest in seeing this implemented?

If this was somehow in scope for implementing, it would have to be broken down into several tasks - creating an nullable field in the database table user (or such); sorting out where and how this would be displayed (as there is no standard concept of displaying anything at all on a user page and creating user pages is optional); furthermore, resolving this request will not magically allow you to "to see what other Wikimedians are in my area" if it is implemented as a free-form field, plus in addition it would require some concept of allowing to search. This sounds pretty complex.

Aklapper renamed this task from Allow user profiles to store user location to Allow user profiles to store geographical user location.Sep 5 2022, 8:27 PM

Privacy is my main concern here - any implementation of this feature would have to make it clear that this information is public/the implications of this

just eliminates the technical nightmare of organizing location data with userboxes.

The usecase of this is not clear to me. Is there something in particular people want to do with users' locations?

@jrbs Please see "Use cases" in the task description...

@Lectrician1: The "use cases" in the task description do not explain it. You can neither "see what other Wikimedians are in my area" (what for?) nor will "be able to easily contact these Wikimedians and organize meetups" just by adding such a database field...

@Aklapper

"see what other Wikimedians are in my area" (what for?)

Out of interest? To see the concentration of Wikimedians and where they are located in parts of a city or region? This way you could find the best place to meet that would accommodate everyone best...

nor will "be able to easily contact these Wikimedians and organize meetups" just by adding such a database field...

Both of these would be separate features that would be possible because of the location data now present. They should probably be subtasks as you stated before but I just created this one task to explain the possible usefulness of allowing the storage of location data to begin with.

Would you like me to create subtasks that draft out the entire proposal and what is needed?

Out of interest? To see the concentration of Wikimedians and where they are located in parts of a city or region? This way you could find the best place to meet that would accommodate everyone best...

@Lectrician1: I'm afraid you likely won't by this proposal. Either you'd already need to know the usernames of people to look up which geographical information they may have exposed on their user page (and currently that would be in free text format). Or if you have some search functionality in mind, then I don't see how variations of random free text strings (may they be a city, a region, a country, a university, in all kinds of variations of spelling) would help you find people who are around.

@Aklapper That's why the location field would not be a free text like it is on GitHub, but rather a link to a coordinate or actual geographic feature like in OpenStreetMap. This would require using a geocoding search service like Nominatim and/or a map where the user can select where a point or feature where they are located.

@Aklapper That's why the location field would not be a free text like it is on GitHub, but rather a link to a coordinate or actual geographic feature like in OpenStreetMap. This would require using a geocoding search service like Nominatim and/or a map where the user can select where a point or feature where they are located.

I think this would be a fairly major change to user pages as we use and understand them in the MediaWiki context. I also worry there are some real privacy issues around allowing people to potentially provide their home’s geolocation (yes, it would be ideal just to provide a country or city, but there will always be people who provide more detail than that).

I don’t know how GitHub manages this problem but the free text field they have may be to mitigate that risk. In any case, I feel like what you are proposing is a more data-driven user page which would require a lot of development time as well as community consensus.

In any case, I feel like what you are proposing is a more data-driven user page which would require a lot of development time as well as community consensus.

That's why I'm maybe considering making an extension on my own.