About GeoOracle
GeoOracle is a small daily geography game, built and run by one person. There is no company behind it, no investor and no growth plan — it exists because a place that talks about itself is a better way to learn geography than a list of capitals.
Who runs it
GeoOracle is operated by mxw-it, the sole proprietorship of Maximilian Wiese in Wahlstedt, Germany. The same person writes the code, curates the places and answers the mail. The full provider details are in the imprint.
Where the facts come from
Places and their raw data come from Wikidata, the structured-data project behind Wikipedia: coordinates, country, population, founding year and the names a place carries in other languages. A short factual summary from Wikipedia is added. Both are available under free licences, and both are named here because a fact without a source is worth little in a game that asks you to trust it.
Who writes the texts
The clues, the opening line and the descriptions on the archive pages are written by a language model from that fact sheet, then checked: a second pass flags any claim the fact sheet does not support, a filter rejects text that gives away the name, and a third check rejects any passage that reuses eight or more words in a row from the source. What fails is not published. The texts are therefore machine-written, but neither copied nor unchecked — and this page says so rather than pretending otherwise.
How it is paid for
GeoOracle is free and has no accounts. Running it costs money, mostly for the language model that answers your questions. Advertising is meant to cover part of that, and it only loads if you agree to it; without your consent the game works exactly the same. Details are in the privacy policy.
Getting in touch
Corrections, a wrong fact, a broken clue or an idea — all welcome.