wiki-geoparquet

English Wikipedia main-namespace articles with Earth coordinates, as GeoParquet + PMTiles.

Coordinates, inlink counts, article length, Wikidata QIDs, image links, and descriptions. Updated monthly from Wikipedia SQL dumps.

demo: shane98c.github.io/wiki-geoparquet

Data

All files are on R2 with CORS enabled — query directly from the browser or any Parquet-aware tool:

File	Description
wikipedia_geotagged.parquet	GeoParquet, Hilbert-sorted with bbox covering
wikipedia_geotagged.pmtiles	Vector tiles, auto-zoom with overzoom, drops by article length
wikipedia_search.parquet	Lightweight search index (lowercased label, coords, inlink count), sorted by label for prefix-range row-group pruning

Pinned versions are also available on GitHub Releases.

Schema

Column	Type	Description
geometry	WKB Point	WGS84 coordinates
page_id	int32	Wikipedia page ID
qid	string	Wikidata QID (e.g. Q90) — use for joins with Wikidata
label	string	Article title
description	string	Short description from wikibase-shortdesc
gt_type	string	Wikipedia geo classification (city, mountain, landmark, etc.)
gt_primary	bool	Whether coordinates are the article's primary geo_tag
page_len	int32	Article length in bytes
inlink_count	int32	Number of namespace-0 pagelinks pointing here
wikipedia_url	string	Full article URL
image_url	string	Wikimedia Commons image URL
bbox	struct	Covering bbox for spatial predicate pushdown

The PMTiles carry a subset of these properties (no geometry, qid, wikipedia_url, image_url, or bbox). Reconstruct URLs client-side:

• Article: https://en.wikipedia.org/?curid={page_id}
• Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/{image}

Quick start

Query with DuckDB

INSTALL spatial; LOAD spatial;

-- Find the most notable geotagged articles
SELECT label, inlink_count, page_len, gt_type, ST_AsText(geometry)
FROM 'https://pub-016504dd3a4d419a9c17a8939840935e.r2.dev/v1/wikipedia_geotagged.parquet'
ORDER BY inlink_count DESC
LIMIT 20;

-- Spatial query: articles within 50km of Paris
SELECT label, inlink_count, gt_type
FROM 'https://pub-016504dd3a4d419a9c17a8939840935e.r2.dev/v1/wikipedia_geotagged.parquet'
ORDER BY inlink_count DESC;

Browser search with duckdb-wasm

The wikipedia_search.parquet index has columns label (lowercased, used for both sorting and lookup), lon, lat, and inlink_count for ranking. It's sorted by label so a lowercased prefix range lets DuckDB skip row groups and fetch ~2 MB per query instead of the full ~25 MB file.

// In duckdb-wasm, INSTALL httpfs (or SET builtin_httpfs = false) — without
// this the built-in HTTP handler downloads the whole file on every query.
// See https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb-wasm/issues/2153.
await conn.query("SET builtin_httpfs = false;");

const q = userInput.toLowerCase().replace(/'/g, "''");
await conn.query(`
  SELECT label, lon, lat
  FROM 'https://.../wikipedia_search.parquet'
  WHERE label >= '${q}' AND label < '${q}~'
  ORDER BY inlink_count DESC
  LIMIT 10
`);

Use pmtiles in MapLibre

import { Protocol } from "pmtiles";

let protocol = new Protocol();
maplibregl.addProtocol("pmtiles", protocol.tile);

const map = new maplibregl.Map({
  style: {
    sources: {
      wikipedia: {
        type: "vector",
        url: "pmtiles://https://pub-016504dd3a4d419a9c17a8939840935e.r2.dev/v1/wikipedia_geotagged.pmtiles",
      },
    },
    layers: [
      {
        id: "articles",
        source: "wikipedia",
        "source-layer": "wikipedia",
        type: "circle",
        paint: {
          "circle-radius": [
            "interpolate",
            ["linear"],
            ["sqrt", ["get", "inlink_count"]],
            0,
            2.5,
            280,
            20,
          ],
          "circle-color": "#4264fb",
        },
      },
    ],
  },
});

How it works

1. Streams 5 Wikipedia SQL dump files (~12 GB) and extracts geotagged pages with Earth coordinates (preferring primary, falling back to non-primary), filtering to main-namespace non-redirect articles. Drops catalog articles (List of …, Listed buildings …, Timeline of …) when their coord is non-primary — that's how we distinguish "Timeline of Pittsburgh" (a city history, kept) from "Timeline of the Syrian civil war" (an event at an incidental location, dropped)
2. Joins with page metadata, Wikidata properties, and pagelinks-based inlink counts
3. Writes Hilbert-sorted GeoParquet with bbox covering via DuckDB spatial
4. Pipes DuckDB to tippecanoe for PMTiles with attribute-based feature dropping

See the Makefile for build steps.

Data source

All data from English Wikipedia SQL dumps, released under CC BY-SA 4.0.

License

Code: MIT Data outputs: CC BY-SA 4.0 (derived from Wikipedia/Wikidata)