Talk:Volunteered geographic information

Criticism missing reference
I moved the following criticism here, since it seems valid, however is unsourced:

In the case of Google Map Maker, the term VGI is criticized because it excuses a policy of accepting contributions without offering legal or technical functionality to use the product of that work elsewhere.

I did a brief search, but couldn't find any specific criticism of Google Map Maker along these lines. I'll try and do a more comprehensive search over the course of the next few days. LateralMoraine (talk) 01:49, 3 April 2013 (UTC)


 * Yes I don't understand that criticism.
 * I would criticise Google Map Maker for not being open (See this this comparison of Google Map Maker and OpenStreetMap, a wiki page which I wrote the first version of) I would very firmly criticise google for building their own closed VGI system rather than working with and supporting OpenStreetMap. I would also criticise anyone who volunteers their time towards it knowing that they could be volunteering their time to OpenStreetMap.
 * But regarding that sentence, I would say Google Map Maker is Volunteered Geographic Information, it's just that the volunteers are all making a poor choice.
 * -- Harry Wood (talk) 13:34, 20 April 2017 (UTC)

Faulty reference
The term VGI is not used in the cited article by Mark Graham, nor is the original Michael Goodchild article referenced in Graham's work. It could be argued that the term VGI is implicit in Graham's work, since he's describing the same user-generated geographic content that Goodchild does, however this seems a bit of a stretch. Furthermore, the sentence in question, "a special case of the larger Web phenomenon known as user-generated content," is a direct quotation from the original Goodchild article. LateralMoraine (talk) 02:01, 3 April 2013 (UTC)

Dubious coinage
The idea of "volunteered" data is not well-defined and therefore dubious. Map data is either open source or proprietary. -Inowen (nlfte) 07:30, 3 November 2018 (UTC)


 * You may not like the idea of VGI, but the term is widespread in the literature: a search for "volunteered geographic information" on Google Scholar today returns about 14,900 results, including a huge number of articles that use the term in the article title. I removed the Template:Dubious that you added. If you want to add more criticism of the idea from reliable sources, add it to the existing criticism section. In any case, this article needs some more cleanup (structural editing). Biogeographist (talk) 12:41, 12 April 2019 (UTC)