Humanitarian organisations are reluctant to use information from social media when responding to crises or conflicts, identifying trust and accuracy as principal concerns. However, the Geographic Information Science literature contains significant research into uncertainty, research we draw upon here to characterise locality descriptions in incident reports related to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. We do so using a classification developed to georeference locality descriptions in MaNIS, the Mammal Networked Information System. We found that although there are similarities between the datasets, crowdsourced crisis information presents significant challenges with respect to vagueness, ambiguity and precision (resolution)
