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ESRI Creating and Editing Articles on Wikipedia?

posted by Satri on Wednesday September 27, @04:19PM   Printer-friendly   Email story  Permalink  Trackback URI  Slashdotthis  Diggthis  Del.icio.us
from the would-that-make-James-Fee-happier-with-wikipedia? dept.
ESRI Media Education
geognerd writes "I was looking at and making some minor edits to a few GIS-related topics on Wikipedia. Something in the edit history of those pages caught my eye. A user called "Redlands" has made 37 contributions to GIS articles since Sep 21 of this year. These articles range in subject from Jack Dangermond to ArcGIS Server. Many of the contributions include links to ESRI's website or projects they are affiliated with, like the National Geographic MapMachine.

"Redlands" is also the creator of the Wikipedia article for GIS Day and has made all of the edits thus far. The same holds true for the article on ArcWeb Services, ArcGIS Server, and ArcExplorer.

This is a curiosity. I wonder if "Redlands" is an ESRI insider, an employee of their marketing department, someone at the University of Redlands, or someone who just likes the name Redlands. Ethical questions could be raised if these articles were written by ESRI. For example, the edit by "Redlands" to the Spatial Data Analysis and Spatial Database articles contributed little more than a link to the ESRI Press website."

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  • who cares

    (Score:3, Insightful)
    by Anonymous Voxel on Thursday September 28, @09:38AM (#1008)
    as long as they aren't editing articles to say bad things about GRASS or Intergraph or heck, Manifold, then we should applaud them for filling in GIS data.... of course anything that could be construed as an advertisement should be quickly culled by the open WIKI process and if "redlands" starts just spamming with ESRI ads, then that user should be banned. But as long as they are adding information to the general pool of knowledge then Cheers to them.