Microsoft Lost a City Because They Used Wikipedia Data (theregister.co.uk)

"Microsoft can't tell North from South on Bing Maps," joked The Register, reporting that Microsoft's site had "misplaced Melbourne, the four-million-inhabitant capital of the Australian State of Victoria." Long-time Slashdot reader RockDoctor writes: Though they're trying to minimise it, the recent relocation of Melbourne Australia to the ocean east of Japan in Microsoft's flagship mapping application is blamed on someone having flipped a sign in the latitude given for the city's Wikipedia page. Which may or may not be true. But the simple stupidity of using a globally-editable data source for feeding a mapping and navigation system is ... "awesome" is (for once) an appropriate word.

Well, it's Bing, so at least no-one was actually using it.
"Bing's not alone in finding Australia hard to navigate," reports The Register. "In 2012 police warned not to use Apple Maps as it directed those seeking the rural Victorian town of Mildura into the middle of a desert."

Comments

It's hard to believe.

[hey!]

The amount of data you need assemble a global navigation system is enormous. You don't hire some intern to transcribe data out of Wikipedia, you license it from companies like Tele Atlas.

Now for geographic place names you'd turn to sources like the USGS GNIS system for the US, whatever the local equivalent of GNIS is, or for places that don't have that datasets like GNIS the DoD's Defense Mapping Agency.

It can't possibly be that Bing gets their place/position data mainly from Wikipedia. The only thing I can think is that they did some kind of union of all the geographic name sources they could find in order to maximize the chance of getting a hit on a place name search, and somehow screwed up prioritizing the most reliable sources first.

Re:It's hard to believe.

[AthanasiusKircher]

The source for "we use Wikipedia" also said they just use it for metadata on locations and the actual location API didn't get the location wrong just the search engine subject result.

The thing is -- this is still disturbing on many levels. Repeat after me: Wikipedia is NOT a STABLE source of reliable information. Wikipedia is NOT a STABLE source of reliable information. The very idea that ANYONE is using Wikipedia for ANY application where accuracy or reliability may be desired is disturbing.

And now someone's going to trot out a reference about how Wikipedia is "more accurate" than Britannica or whatever. Maybe it is, at any given moment. And it's certainly more exhaustive on many topics now. But one significant difference between Wikipedia and more traditional sources is that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, at any time -- and that can mean improvements, but it can also mean introducing errors, either accidental of deliberate (vandalism).

Paper Britannica, whatever its flaws are, doesn't spontaneously generate new typos every time I open it.

And a few years back we could all laugh this off while still praising the great things Wikipedia was doing. No more. Wikipedia's active editors are shrinking all the time, but the vandals show no sign of shrinking... if anything, they seem to be growing and becoming smarter to evade the bots that will revert obvious vandalism (e.g., random insertions of profanity). And that doesn't count random, well-meaning mistakes that people introduce or deliberate attempts to slant entries in a particular way.

And if you think you haven't seen vandalism, you probably don't realize how subtle it can be. I still remember a few years back when I discovered an odd century error in a history article -- something was listed as 19XX when it obviously should have been 17XX. Then I noticed another one in the article. I checked the edit history and found a vandal who had been going through and changing random DIGITS in DATES for history articles. The ones I saw were rather obvious. But in other articles he had just changed a year or decade, in which case few people were likely to notice the discrepancy. These edits had been live for weeks... nobody had noticed them.

Such vandalism might stay in entries for years. Media sources now use Wikipedia frequently and even academics sometimes take info from it without verifying. (Particularly for something that would seem obvious, like a basic date for a common event.) Now what happens when those academics start putting the wrong dates in books because they read it on Wikipedia? Before, when I saw a different date in a history book, I might even assume it might be because there was some scholarly debate over when an event happened exactly... now it could just be arbitrary randomness introduced by the vandals.

The ONLY thing we have going for us to protect Wikipedia is that MOST of these vandals can't help themselves. They don't have the initiative to build up a reputation of a few good edits before embarking on a mission of anarchy, nor do they have the discipline to refrain from just being a troll. The date-editing vandal I mentioned above was eventually caught and his edits reverted, but ONLY because he finally posted "X is a dirty slut!" or something on a prominent female historical figure's article, leading someone to check out what this guy had been doing. But as I said, his edits stood for weeks without anyone noticing. Do we really want to rely on the trolls outing themselves as our main safety net??

Go to more obscure articles, and lots of bad stuff can happen. Just a week ago I was reading an article on American history, and I encountered a few sentences that seemed quite surprising and unlikely. They seemed to be propaganda based on current political stuff going on in the U.S., but it was framed as though it was a part of a historical event. I looked some of this up, and couldn't find any source for this -- I'm reasonably cer

Yandex or DuckDuckGo

[Anonymous Coward]

A better choice would be DuckDuckGo or even Yandex.

Microsoft can match up your Windows 10 id to your search history and their new deals to put their office apps on Android means they can link that to your phone number and phone operation. (Note, their apps runs run on Android in the background whether you ever open them or not, and those apps send data to Microsoft all the time).

Microsoft would like to be the next all-spying Google, so best to avoid them too.