“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.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.
See the original post:
Microsoft Lost a City Because They Used Wikipedia Data
