Talk:Geodatabase (Esri)

Bplewe (talk) 16:22, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Citations.

Added several sources to the text where applicable. They may need to be formatted to fit in line citations (I'm not quite sure how to set that within the draft). They will be useful throughout the document I believe.

I will add more as I go to help this along. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 18:04, 22 January 2023 (UTC)

More citations

Added a lot more citations, especially in history. There are a lot of Esri citations; it is challenging to document the technical details of a vendor product without citing the vendor's own documentation, but I tried to mix it up a bit. Bplewe (talk) 04:35, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

So Admin are being a bit strict on this one. Next step for more citations that aren't Esri based would be Google Scholar search. There are a good amount of peer reviewed journals that have "geodatabase" in the title when you search. </nowiki> GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 07:05, 31 January 2023 (UTC)

Except that they are also saying there are too many primary source citations, and journal articles would only increase that. The problem is that the textbooks (which they would prefer as sources) don't go into the level of detail beyond where I am already citing them. Bplewe (talk) 16:27, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

I think that there might be a disconnect on what some people refer to as "primary" source. I could be wrong, but it seems the issue would be material published by ESRI or the software owner. The Secondary sources would be from people who are not financially gaining from the topic. In this case, while a researcher is a primary source for the subject of their research, they are a secondary source when it comes to describing and establishing the wide spread use of geodatabases. The outside journal articles build the argument for geodatabases being really important and established in the literature, while an ESRI source might just be advertisements (however my Zotero is filled to the brim with stuff from ESRI, and I'd argue their software documentation is almost second to none). Geographers and GIS professionals intrinsically know the geodatabase is important, we just need to demonstrate how widespread the format is in the industry through examples. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 18:11, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

An example of what I mean is on this page I made recently for SaTScan. SaTSCan is way less significant then geodatabases, but definitely notable. I used journals that made use of the software to demonstrate that in addition to the proprietary software manuals. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 18:26, 24 February 2023 (UTC)

Proposed merger

Not sure why this page is struggling to make it past draft so much, as a geographer geodatabase is a word in everyone's vernacular. I suggest merging this draft with spatial database until we can get enough sources to split it off.

Applications section to build notability

According to Wikipedia:Notability, "Editors evaluating notability should consider not only any sources currently named in an article, but also the possibility or existence of notability-indicating sources that are not currently named in the article." I believe that the scope of the topic demonstrated by a casual search on Google Scholar (like here) should be enough to meet this criteria. This shows many peer reviewed journals using the word "geodatabase" in their title. An "applications" section could be included that could reference these articles in more detail, to build notability. I believe that is unnecessary for notability, however, as reviewers are not easily convinced on this, it might help add citations in a natural way. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 13:46, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Hi @GeogSage As the AfC review who declined the draft, I have no issue with you moving it main space and would not view it as controversial. S0091 (talk) 14:01, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

@S0091: How does that make sense? Why decline the draft but not object to a main-space move? Has it greatly improved in a few days -- Yae4 (talk) 14:54, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

@Yae4 Because GeogSage is stating secondary sources exist and are willing to improve it. See also WP:WikiProject Articles for creation/Help desk#Disputing Declined Articles for creation: Geodatabase (Esri). If that is the case and if nominated for deletion they believe it would be kept, I am not going to stand in the way. Going through AfC again is not a requirement. S0091 (talk) 15:11, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. Watching the helpdesk is where this caught my attention. At a glance there #1 PACKT is self-published bloggy source IIRC, brought up at RSN a couple times[1]. -- Yae4 (talk) 15:28, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

@S0091@Yae4

Thanks for taking the time to look at this. Took a break for a few days to work on other things and start with fresh head here. I am not the originator of this page, and it has already been pushed to draft a couple times, so I don't want to be the one to pull the trigger on launching it against consensus (however, I will argue with consensus until I'm blue in the face). Don't want to see this deleted, and also don't want to have an article I'm not responsible for starting end up as one of my articles, when that should be Bplewe.

As a geographer, this has been a frustrating one because the term is so widely used in my daily life. I understand that is not the case for non-GIS people however. The ESRI Press books are widely used sources on this topic written by fairly noteworthy people, however the company ESRI that developed geodatabases is obviously the publisher, so there will be a conflict of interest on that, even if it is mostly by appearances. Unfortunately, ESRI Press is one of the biggest publishers on GIS, and their sources are quite good. This is why finding sources to describe them is hard, the best are all by ESRI press, and this isn't a good look. Trying to describe a geodatabase is hard without them, however applications are easy as they are really wide spread.

Working on putting together sources outside of ESRI for an application section. Have put some on Epidemiology already, and working on a couple others. Will avoid the use of any ESRI Press books on this to start, even though I have a library of them.

A merge with the page ESRI will get messy fast, and would quickly need to be split in my opinion. Category:Esri software is pretty extensive, and many of the Category:GIS file formats are ESRI Proprietary. They are the Microsoft of GIS. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 06:02, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

It only takes a few "good" sources - with "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject." to establish notability. If you're working hard to find that for Geodatabase Esri (not ESRI) maybe you should pause and reconsider. Those categories are a target rich environment for someone wanting a Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion hobby. I understand why companies want as many articles with links to their sites as possible, but one company throwing up a bunch of poor articles that won't be well maintained isn't the greatest for wikipedia; see the bunch of red links in the template I added. Oh well, good luck. -- Yae4 (talk) 20:44, 30 May 2023 (UTC)

Ah, not really working hard, just not putting my full attention to it.

For example, one section I'm thinking could have some decent citations is on geodatabases as they are employed for environmental management (after public health, this is the next category I'm focusing on). Searching Google Scholar for "geodatabase environmental management" yields several pages of results, as seen here. I'm starting out with easy ones that use geodatabase in the title, like the chapter of this Springer book here. Then, looking at highly cited articles that include them within the text body but not the title. Finally, going to cites like the Census.gov TIGER/Line Geodatabases web page, which shows the US government using geodatabases as a default data type for storing map data.

This is a fun citation challenge because I'm finding GIS people don't include this as a step in their process, any more then a researcher includes creating a new folder to house their data. Geodatabases are an assumed step in many cases when doing spatial analysis or just general spatial data management.

I'm not an ESRI representative, I'm a graduate student with no financial gain from this, just a hobby I use to encourage myself to do my required readings. Within Geographic Information Systems, Esri (name change is new to me actually. Last I checked they were an acronym for "Environmental Systems Research Institute") is not "some company" but "the company." While I could see them pushing out a bunch of Wikipedia pages, I could also see many GIS people like myself doing it. From what I can tell, they are still about half the global market share for GIS, and probably way more then that in the United States. While this might not seem like a big deal, GIS is what powers most digital cartography and web mapping today. For example, many of the dashboards we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the John Hopkins University one were powered by Esri. I can pretty much assure you that the John Hopkins University dashboard had several geodatabases involved in its file architecture. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 05:20, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

The first thing I saw at Google books was a self-published ESRI press book, Modeling Our World, which is already cited here 3 times. My suggestion is merge this draft into Esri, which already duplicates some of the info. As a separate article this has an expanding advertising feel. -- Yae4 (talk) 14:41, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Adding: There is a Geodatabase redirect[2]. Next we need a disambiguation? -- Yae4 (talk) 14:45, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Merger proposal, into Esri

I propose merging Draft:Geodatabase (Esri) into Esri. I think the content in Draft:Geodatabase (Esri) can easily be explained in the context of Esri, and a merger would not cause any article-size or weighting problems in Esri, as there is already significant discussion of Geodatabase there. -- Yae4 (talk) 15:03, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

@Yae4 your input is quite helpful and I suggest @GeogSage give it due consideration. S0091 (talk) 17:13, 26 May 2023 (UTC)

Merge into Spatial database?

First off, thanks @GeogSage for going to bat for me and this page. I have created and/or overhauled a lot of GIS related pages in Wikipedia, and I have never had such a hard time getting something published. With the hundreds of stubs and otherwise crappy pages out there, why pick on a page with dozens of source citations because they are not quite exactly the ideal kinds of sources? I did not write this page as Esri propaganda and I am no Esri apologist; I wrote it to explain one of the three most ubiquitous data formats in the industry (how is that for notability?), and is thus comparable to the dozens of other data format pages in Wikipedia. Most if not all of these rely heavily on specification documents from the format owner (exactly the kinds of primary sources that are frowned upon). I totally agree with the source philosophy and guidelines of Wikipedia, but it proved very difficult to find "public knowledge" type sources (encyclopedic, textbooks, etc.) that went into any technical depth on the geodatabase format; it is mentioned in every intro GIS textbook, but only superficially. Basically, everyone says, "if you want the technical details, go to the Esri documentation." The same goes for the relatively small independent GIS professional (rather than academic) publishing industry. That said, this article does cite quite a few textbooks and independent sources whenever possible; the Nasser source on its own should be enough to fulfill the source guidelines.

I agree with the solutions @GeogSage and others have suggested, either to 1) expand the coverage of this page beyond the technical structure to talk about applications and such, which would be found in a wider variety of sources; and/or 2) combine it with another page. I would strongly suggest Spatial database rather than Esri; it is a special case of spatial database and would thus fit well (if making that page longer than would be ideal). Merging it into Esri would make it seem even more like company propaganda.Bplewe (talk) 06:06, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

• Strong Oppose of merge into Spatial database, which is a broad topic and already mentions Esri geodatabase sufficiently. Adding this article extensive content would be overweight there.

I appreciate the effort going into this article.

I agree in general Wikipedia sourcing rules are not good, and there are many poorly sourced (and many inaccurate) articles. Having "significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject" sounds great, but isn't. :) Those are irrelevant issues, here.

> Basically, everyone says, "if you want the technical details, go to the Esri documentation."

Have you considered the possibility this would be the best for Wikipedia to say also? Please see WP:NOTTEXTBOOK.

There are two independent (unconnected) editors supporting merge into Esri, immediately above. -- Yae4 (talk) 20:43, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

Microsoft Office has its own page separate from Microsoft. Under this, Microsoft word, Microsoft Excel , Microsoft Powerpoint, Microsoft OneNote, and Microsoft Outlook all have different pages. Individual file types like Doc (computing), Comma-separated values, and Text file all have their own pages as well. Geodatabases are replacing the Shapefile, another widely used Esri file type with its own page. Geodatabases are an Esri proprietary file format, but they can be read by QGIS and GeoDa as well, and are the file type used by the US census to distiribute their Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing. At this point, even with the Esri press material excluded, the page has more citations to peer reviewed journals then many similar topics (not that I would recommend eliminating the Esri press citations).

If you want documentation on Microsoft word, Microsoft may be the best source of information, just like Esri press text books and manuals. In the past few days, I have included several peer-reviewed articles making use of the geodatabase format, as well as government literature. While a Geodatabase may not seem like a major file type to non-geographers, within the field of GIS they are one of the most fundamental and basic file types used. Merging it under Esri would immediately make the Esri page way to large, just like trying to force every Microsoft file type into the Microsoft page. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 22:53, 31 May 2023 (UTC)

To quote another WP:AFD, "see WP:OSE and WP:AON. We're not discussing other articles, we are discussing this one". I'm not sure about too long, but with ability to consolidate with the related stuff already at Esri, it probably won't be. You could look at WP:GA examples if there are some in this topic. -- Yae4 (talk) 03:21, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

The organizational system of other companies proprietary software and file types is something to look at for an example when approaching similar articles. In the case of the largest GIS software company by market share, comparing it, its software, and filetypes to Microsoft is one way to try and plan out what pages to consider. Another option is the company Adobe Inc., which might be a better comparison to GIS then Microsoft. On Adobe, there are pages for Adobe Illustrator as a product. On the Adobe Illustrator page, there are file types like SVG and Adobe Illustrator Artwork. Creating a page geodatabases (.gdb) file types seems like a natural mirror of how these other topics are organized. Further, while Esri is where .gdb extensions originate, other software make use of the file architecture. Limiting them only to the Esri page would be like putting all of the information from Office Open XML onto the Microsoft page. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 05:25, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

I believe the article is at around 6 peer reviewed journals, including one from Applied geography and another from the Journal "Scientific data." There are at least 5 non-ESRI textbooks, and more then 5 misc. sources such as white papers, and other software technical documentation.

I don't know how much more an article can have to make it to pass verification and move into the "start" or "C" class. I know it isn't "Good" article status, but how many new articles are immediately at that level? GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 06:26, 1 June 2023 (UTC)

And two independent and unconnected contributors supporting its existence. Again, neither me nor GeogSage have any connection to Esri, and our only connection to each other is in working on this page. I completely agree the general concern about corporate propaganda in Wikipedia. However, this page is not that at all. We have gone out of our way to write this text with an independent voice; even though many of our sources are promotional materials, it reads nothing like those. Rather, I went to great lengths to carefully glean the actual facts out of the propaganda. That said, I have no need to die on this hill, so if the choice is to move it to the main space whereupon Yae4 appears to be ready to delete it, or leave it in draft space until it is improved (hopefully from more contributors), I'd rather do the latter. Yae4, could you provide us a concrete threshold of what more you expect for us to add to establish quality/notability/independence for you to allow it to live in the main space? One more high-quality secondary source replacing some of the Esri citations? Changes to the language? Another section or two? Bplewe (talk) 18:10, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

My suggestion is to trim out as much as possible that is only sourced to them and rely mostly on secondary sources. Even so, COI/Paid is not an issue here so there is nothing preventing any autoconfirmed editor from moving this into main space. S0091 (talk) 18:21, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

@Bplewe as you are an autoconfirmed editor and this is your article, I think you could try moving it into mains pace again, or just hit the resubmit button on this page. Personally, I think the page looks great for a new article and is more then exceeded the sources normally needed for verification, but can probably use some TLC. The section on "Applications" I put together is almost entirely based on peer reviewed literature, and there are enough sources within that section alone that I think the article would meet the minimum standard for verification. Bringing it into the mainspace might attract other editors to help improve the base, which is always good. One way to improve is by following the advice of @S0091. They are right that we are using ALOT of Esri sources, which is inevitable. However, some of the Esri sources might say the same thing, so combining them would shorten the number of references that are associated with the company. The Esri Blog sources would be the first ones to target for replacement, followed by the ArcNews Online, whenever possible. While a shorter reference list might sound counter intuitive, it would make people less inclined to think this is just Esri marketing, as the geodatabase file architecture is used outside their software (as is shown in the Application support section I threw on). GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 00:26, 23 June 2023 (UTC)

That's a good idea. The main purpose of the Blog and ArcNews sources is that they are the best currently available source for historical developments (when each feature was added), which would be difficult to replace. I wish there were more advanced GIS textbooks out there; I'll take one more look before I republish it. Bplewe (talk) 19:12, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

I agree that there needs to be more non-Esri GIS textbooks. In my professional life, a GIS book that builds on the new theoretical implications of the discipline is actually one of my goals, but I'm still a distance from that. I'd want to discuss things in the context of both Esri and Open source. This gap in the literature is definitely something someone so inclined could focus on.

I use Wikipedia to help with my literature reviews. From what I see in this page, it looks like you have enough literature here that you could publish a systemic review article, or just a history of them, perhaps targeting the journal Cartographica. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 19:45, 28 June 2023 (UTC)

@GeogSage I was following up on some old drafts I'd declined and see you are still working on this one. Where does this stand? S0091 (talk) 18:18, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

I think it has enough outside material to pass verification, but still has a lot of ESRI sources. The originator of the article @Bplewe hasn't worked on it for a while, and I didn't want to launch it/be the one to press the button. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 18:23, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

@GeogSage Are you comfortable with resubmitting it review? That does not make you "responsible". Many editors, including myself, submit drafts we did not create because we think there's a decent chance for acceptance. S0091 (talk) 18:27, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

I'd need to double check again, but it is approaching that point for sure. There probably needs to be some content shuffled, it's been a while. I think it would pass verification at this point but would need work. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 18:47, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

Sounds good! If you want to submit on behalf of Bplewe, use {{subst:submit|Bplewe}}. Just be aware any AfC communication will go to their talk page. S0091 (talk) 19:10, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

I've resubmitted it, @GeogSage. Let's hope for the best. Bplewe (talk) 18:58, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Awesome! Nice to see you back on again. I have had this page on my list since March 4th, but have had a few real world obligations that have held me back. I'm glad to see this get submitted! I'll keep watching this and if I stumble upon literature on geodatabases will definitely include it. GeogSage ^{(⚔Chat?⚔)} 21:15, 31 March 2024 (UTC)

Feedback from New Page Review process

I left the following feedback for the creator/future reviewers while reviewing this article: Good day! Thank you for contributing to Wikipedia by writing this article. I have marked the article as reviewed. Have a wonderful and blessed day for you and your family!

✠ SunDawn ✠ (contact) 10:52, 2 April 2024 (UTC)