Slashgeo

The Google Earth Blog discuss and provide links related to Wikipedia for Google Earth and WikiSearch tool. From the blog: "Apparently someone named Stefan Kuhn processed a database with about 34,000 wikipedia story locations and ranked them according to description file size. KASSPER then created a network link allowing you to view the locations as placemarks in Google Earth. [...] In the same GEC thread, KASSPER also posted a nifty web page tool for searching the Wikipedia database for locations." This topic is very dear to me. Numerous efforts are made towards Geo-enabled Wikis. Here's some links (including traditionnal wikis and geo-enabled wikis): giswiki.de traditionnal wiki and EOGeo FreeGISBook, Tikiwiki+Mapserver , WikiTravel, WorldKit GeoWiki. Keep in mind the OSGeo also has plans regarding this issue as previously discussed on their mailing list.

About five years ago, I generated a summary table for Earth Observation satellites. This table is somewhat obsolete and as you might guess, requires efforts to maintain. I though a few times about converting the table into a wiki table in order to share the workload and allow frequent updates... maybe now it's time to act! Prior starting the conversion, I'd like your advice! Here's what I found: there's already a list of Earth observation satellites on wikipedia, but a list does not give you a quick overview of characteristics and differences. We also have resources, some wiki tables can be more or less complex and large. What do you think? Is this a good idea? Shall we keep breaking the sensors into groups such as "high resolution", "multispectral", "radar", "hyperspectral", etc (see ARSIST). What should be the rules? Earth Observation only? 1km resolution or better? Oh yeah, one last thing... I'd really appreciate some help! Anyone's interested? :-)

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."