Slashgeo has written up on a user “Redlands” contributing to articles on ESRI and GIS in general. The ethical issues aside, you just can’t tell if this really is someone from ESRI or not because there is no IP to verify. Even then, just because it says that the IP came from the inland empire, that still doesn’t mean it was someone from ESRI. Bottom line is that we have no idea who this person is and it just reinforces my stance that you can’t trust Wikipedia.
See, Wikipedia Can’t Be Trusted
September 27th, 2006 · 10 Comments · GIS
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10 responses so far ↓
1
PHL
// Sep 27, 2006 at 5:09 pm
Ah, good old Alexandre Leroux, who personally added SlashGeo to all those Wikipedia pages.
2
GeoMullah
// Sep 27, 2006 at 7:10 pm
Blastphemy! Wikipedia is the greatest thing since Jimmy Wales crapped sliced bread!
3
Ron Exler
// Sep 27, 2006 at 7:43 pm
ESRI knows a little about GIS and has contributed a tremendous amount to the body of knowledge, but it should be open if it is posting on Wikipedia. Someone should just ask ESRI - I volunteer. Meanwhile, I agree people should not entirely trust Wikipedia. It’s not a primary source for serious researchers.
4
Tom Kralidis
// Sep 27, 2006 at 7:53 pm
I heard at a conference earlier this year at collaborative GIS / Web2.0 type talk that there was a comparison of Wikipedia vs. Encyclopaedia Britannica of a sampling of terms. Wikipedia had 40 errors. Encyclopaedia Britannica had 80.
I guess all information should be taken with some degree of caution.
5
Chris Tweedie
// Sep 27, 2006 at 8:00 pm
I honestly dont know what the big fuss is. If it was ESRI, who cares? Submit something better and get it changed.
Companies writing about themselves is nothing new anywhere on the web, let alone wikipedia. I did a quick scan of the articles and theyre all harmless imo.
Would you prefer ESRI writing about their products or getting a community “expert” who uses google as their source of reference?
Storm in teacup thx James
6
James Fee
// Sep 27, 2006 at 8:03 pm
I don’t mind ESRI or any other company correcting inconsistencies, but writing the article, not that would make Wikipedia not worth the paper it is written on.
(oh wait, that isn’t right)
re: Encyclopedia Britannica vs Wikipedia
At least I can hold someone responsible at one of those two choices. The other one is anonymous.
7
Laurent Jégou
// Sep 27, 2006 at 10:33 pm
Of course the wikipedia can’t be trusted… it’s following from it’s very nature. It’s not a peer-reviewed scholar work. I’m always amazed by the fact that the Wikipedia is still online (there must be tremendous efforts in the background to maintain consistency).
8
Martin Daly
// Sep 27, 2006 at 11:19 pm
Tom,
Don’t believe everything that you hear. You should have treated that information with “some degree of caution.” Britannica posted a (lengthy) rebuttal:
corporate.britannica.com/britannica_nature_response.pdf
Now, who to believe?
Martin
9
Alexandre Leroux
// Sep 28, 2006 at 5:55 am
PHL, yup, I did added slashgeo to some related external links pages a long time ago. Was this spamming or not, I don’t think so but I can understand others might disagree.
James and PHL, FYI, I did not wrote the story about ESRI and Wikipedia. It’s Slashgeo’s user Geognerd who did. The “Slashgeo has written up…” is confusing! Oh… and by the way, I am not Slashgeo. We are fours guys behind the site. I am a regular man trying its best for a community I care for
10
Justin
// Sep 28, 2006 at 8:38 am
Every Wikipedia article should cite its sources. “Verifiability” is one of the basic policies of the project. If you see a statement of fact which does not cite a verifiable source, you can track down a source yourself, flag it as unsourced, or delete it.
You shouldn’t trust a Wikipedia article any further than you can trust its source material. The difference between a Wikipedia article and most of the fluff you find online is that a properly written Wikipedia article cites external sources.
One benefit of working on Wikipedia articles is that you begin to question the motivation, the source material, and the point-of-view of everything else you read online.
I’m sure the GIS article on Wikipedia could use some of your expert input.
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