Comment The power of Wikipedia (Score 3, Interesting) 37
I had the honour and pleasure of starting this thing. I see the Wikiproject article was created 09:15, 13 February 2005. I made some convention for adding the lat/lon coordinates, which then linked to a small website that had proper link to various map resources (this was before OpenStreetMap). I documented it, then manually added links to a few articles, just to have some critical mass to start it off. After that, it kind of caught on, and now we have a million articles with coordianates, and a whole lot of super mobile phone apps and other applications I could never have imagined.
So you can bash WIkipedia all you want, but to me, this really shows the immense power of Wikipedia.