Talk:What3words/Archive 1

Untitled
It is unfair to say that What3words does not use latitude and longitude coordinates. It does, but it does not display them. The sentence has been edited accordingly.

I replaced the address and the example of the Wikimedia Foundation (a private foundation) with that of the Statue of Liberty (planet.inches.most) as offered by the w3w website.

The phrase "random letter and numbers" is misleading as longithde/latitude does not entail any randomness, and has been rewritten accordingly.

The entry is full of references to favorable reviews disguised as facts of the matter. I moved them to a new section called "Claimed advantages". I also created a section "Criticism".

My advice is that readers should be offered information about how W3W works first, and without any positive (or negative) comment, not even in the references. Thus "Viable alternative" has been edited (and has NOT been replaced with "unviable alternative"!) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Statisticastatistico (talk • contribs) 17:29, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Neutrality disputed
I believe the article is not neutral. I strongly oppose what3words because of its proprietary nature, the fact that you cannot infer proximity, ambiguous addressing and a lot of other concerns. I know I would not be neutral, so I am not going to edit the article. But so far, the article does not mention the disadvantages, and I believe it should. What3fucks, a reaction to what3words, is (although not entirely serious) a much better alternative already. On the OpenStreetMap talk mailing list, there has been a long thread discussing what3words. –Frankly, my dear... I do give a damn! 13:19, 8 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Yes. In the business model section I've just expanded it to describe the "closed standard" nature of what they're doing. I thought there would be an article about closed standards to link to actually. Best I could find was: Network effect. Anyway I think this needs more work. This balance is quite far down the page. The top sections are still a bit brochure-like -- Harry Wood (talk) 15:04, 28 September 2016 (UTC)


 * Someone reverted your additions in revision 742477148, stating " the business model stuff violates WP:NPOV and WP:OR. don't use Wikipedia for advertising ". NPOV: As it stands the article isn't neutral either, it just rambles about their business history and how great the technology is. Advertising: Where was the advertising in that? It's not like the article even mentioned any other product! OR: Fair enough. We'd have to find relevant sources criticizing what3words in order to be allowed to criticize it here. –Frankly, my dear... I do give a damn! 15:48, 20 January 2017 (UTC) (edited to include response to "advertising")


 * I added the section Disadvantages and clones (with sources) and I removed the POV banner. –Frankly, my dear... I do give a damn! 21:42, 20 January 2017 (UTC)

Prior Art
Maybe something for the criticism section: https://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/13629/i-had-invented-and-published-before-this-patent-application-how-do-i-get-it-in I am not familiar enough with Wikipedia to know if the sources cited there are acceptable or if this claim is notable at all. 2A02:1205:5020:8AA0:F177:A1EA:F081:20AC (talk) 08:04, 30 October 2018 (UTC)

Emergency Locator?
I've seen several articles claiming that this "app" has saved lives. There's an article here that claims it not only saved "several" lives, but that police in England are urging everyone to download it: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-49319760 But according to the [Advanced Mobile Location] article, AML doesn't require that the caller has to verbally report their location (as What3words does), and is deployed in England. Why the big push for What3words??165.225.38.125 (talk) 13:14, 21 August 2019 (UTC)


 * I could give you multiple times when the locaiton given by a casualty is a few km away from where they actually are (causing services to look in the wrong place) aslo examples of time wasted while the call handler insists that the caller downloads the W3W app over a poor mobile signal. (Caver Tim) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Caver tim (talk • contribs) 10:32, 11 January 2022 (UTC)
 * According to this BBC News report, "Emergency services' computer systems - known as computer-aided dispatch (CAD) - usually lack the ability to accurately find 999 callers who are unsure of their location". Which, I suspect, means that when you dial 999 and your phone sends an AML text giving your location, there is nothing at the other end yet to receive it. So unless you can give them a house number and post-code, what other option do they have? If you have to communicate location verbally, transmission of recognisable words is far less error-prone than of numbers [W3W's silly error of regarding singular and plural as unique words aside]. And if you move a few metres, you will get another set of words to use as a cross-reference. As a 999 emergency location service, W3W is not much cop but right now it is the best we have. Hopefully its days in that role are numbered. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 11:33, 11 January 2022 (UTC)

You might suspect wrong. The phone might not know where it is either. Ormek (talk) 20:32, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

Does the order of words matter?
For example, if my address were that.was.all, would it be the same as was.that.all? (In general, are these equivalent: ABC, ACB, BAC, BCA, CAB, CBA.) Moreover, may an address include more than one instance of a word? E.g. that.was.that. I tried to find this in the article, but I couldn't find it. I think the answer to these questions would improve the article. Eddi (Talk) 18:58, 14 November 2019 (UTC)
 * You can simply try this yourself at their website. The order of the words does matter, as you can find out when you change the order of the words of an address, you will get a different location (it is not sure if you always get a location). Also, double words are possible, as you can find out by removing one of the words from an address and replace it with one of the other two words of the address, you get (sometimes/always) a valid other address. Gollem (talk) 19:49, 14 November 2019 (UTC)

List of uses by emergency services
The two events related in What3words are rather anecdotal, are they the only two successful uses of what3words by emergency services? If not, I don't think they should be individually detailed. Unless someone is willing to seek out every single use of what3words by emergency services that has been reported on and put them into a table. Pinging as you recently added the second one. codl (talk) 12:43, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

As you already noticed, I solved the problem. Gollem (talk) 15:28, 28 May 2020 (UTC)

WhatFreeWords
As of 21 July 2020, the section "WhatFreeWords" is supported only by citations of a single source, whatfreewords.org, which does not exist so the text as written cannot be verified. In addition, this citation fails WP:PRIMARY, since (if we could see the site), we only have their word for it. Secondary sources are needed: google news gave me nothing. Unless this problem is rectified, it is difficult to see how the section can avoid deletion, which would be a real pity. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 11:10, 21 July 2020 (UTC)
 * The information is not entirely based on a single primary source. There is a reference to a letter from what3words on whatfreewords in the section before. Gollem (talk) 11:10, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
 * Not really. The DMCA take-down notice from W3W to Github refers only to a user called 'Cardinalhood' who has copied W3W's proprietary data onto Github and claims to have reverse engineered its algorithm. The letter says nothing about WFW. For WP purposes, the letter is only useful as citation for text that says that W3W has asserted its IPR in at least one case: it is irrelevant to any material about WFW. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 12:07, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
 * It might indeed not solve all citation problems. However, it does provide a second source for the relevance of whatfreewords. Moreover it provides some technical details on what points whatfreewords might have conflicted with w3w rights and thus how whatfreewords was reverse engineered. This is enough to remove the one source section template and add citation needed labels next to the existing citations where needed. Gollem (talk) 14:15, 15 August 2020 (UTC)
 * That is a huge leap of faith. Short of WP:OR, it provides no such thing. Nothing in the DMCA-TDN mentions WFW.
 * However, I have since found that, unlike archive.org, archive.is did capture it: see https://archive.fo/FW3No and more. So since it interests you, would you rebuild the citations? But I'm afraid the 'single source' tag has to stay unless you have better luck than I did in finding an third-party RS that even gives it a passing mention (beware of WP:CIRCULAR). --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 23:54, 15 August 2020 (UTC)